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Chap,...:.^.rTJopyright >'0t. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



The 

Foundations of English 

Literature 



A Study of the Development of 

English Thought and Expression 

from Beowulf to Milton 



By 

Fred Lewis Pattee 

Professor of English and Rhetoric in the Pennsylvania 
State College 




Silver, Burdett and Company 
Boston New York Chicago 



f T i »: u of t -1 -J 

Register of Copyrl^shfj^ 



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48645 

Copyright, i8gg 

By 

Silver, Burdett and Company 



SECOND COPY, 



PREFACE 

THE object of this book is to present a careful study 
of the origins of English literature, and to trace its 
development up to the time when it assumed its perma- 
nent form. The author has attempted to show that the 
literature of England has been a gradual growth ; that it 
has flowed out of the national life and is inseparably in- 
tertwined with the national history ; that its develop- 
ment has been constant and consecutive from the very 
first, and that it commences not with Chaucer but with 
the primal poetry. The accumulation of a mass of names 
and dates, of biographical matter and encyclopaedic in- 
formation, has not been attempted. All writers who were 
not materially concerned in the evolution of the literature 
have been omitted. The book is not ** a storehouse of 
facts"; its aim is rather to clear away the confusing 
mass of details which has grown up about the subject and 
to expose the main outlines, to trace causes and effects, 
and to show that no author and no period exist as 
isolated phenomena, but that they are merely natural 
results of previous conditions. 

An attempt has been made to study the growth of the 
English spirit and to weigh all influences that have 
prominently affected it in any way. The civil and re- 
ligious history of England has been kept constantly in 
view. The spirit of the age, the condition and the tem- 
per of all 'classes of the people, the gradual development 
of new ideals and of new institutions, the various influ- 
ences that have come from other lands to mold and to 



4 Preface 

modify the native characteristics, have all been carefully 
noted at every step of the work. 

The author believes that there is no other way to 
understand fully the literature arid the intellectual life of 
a people; nor is he alone in this view. ** There is no 
greater desideratum in our literature at present," says a 
recent English critic, " than a complete and able account 
of the history of English literature in which the connec- 
tion between the literary and political history of our 
country shall be fully dealt with." While the author of 
this book does not for an instant presume to assert that it 
is the work demanded above, he does maintain that it is 
written from the right standpoint. It has attempted to 
cover only the foundation period ; it closes with the 
great era of Shakespeare and Milton, when the language 
and the literature and the people had settled into their 
permanent forms. The whole subject of English litera- 
ture is too large to be covered in a single session : it is 
better to study it by periods, and the foundation period 
is the first well rounded unity. 

In the words of Saintsbury, ** None but a charlatan 
will pretend that he has written, and none but a very 
unreasonable person will expect any one else to write, a 
history of the kind free from blunders. ' ' The author will 
esteem it a favor if all who detect errors will communicate 
them to him. An attempt has been made to base all 
facts upon reliable authorities. The chronology has been 
founded as far as possible upon Ryland's Chronological 
Outlines^ and upon Green's Short History ; the biographi- 
cal data have been taken in each case from the most recent 
authorities, and quotations and estimates have been based 
upon the latest reprints and editions. The sincere thanks 
of the author are due to Mr. A. H. Espenshade, of the 
English department of the Pennsylvania State College, 



Preface 5 

for help upon the proof and for valuable suggestions. 
Acknowledgments are also due to Jno: Lesslie Hall for 
extracts from his translation of Beowulf ; and to Charles 
Scribner's Sons; G. P. Putnam's Sons; Ginn & Co.; 
Longmans, Green & Co. ; Cassell & Co. ; Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co. ; Harper & Brothers, and others for per- 
mission to make brief quotations from their publications. 

F. L. P. 

State College, Pa., 
September, 1S99. 



CONTENTS 

[See general index at the end of the volume] 

PAGE 

Bibliographical Note . 8 

CHAPTER I 
The Physical Geography of Britain . . . .11 

CHAPTER II 

Pre- English Britain 16 

CHAPTER III 
The Primitive Englishman 23 

CHAPTER IV 
Anglo-Saxon Britain 30 

CHAPTER V 
Anglo-Saxon Literature, 1 40 

CHAPTER VI 
Anglo-Saxon Literature, II 60 

CHAPTER VII 
Norman England 84 

CHAPTER VIII 
Anglo-Norman Literature 96 

CHAPTER IX 
The Age of Chaucer, I. ...... 105 

CHAPTER X 
The Age of Chaucer, II 118 



Contents 7 

VAGS 

CHAPTER XI 
The Century of Darkness 137 

CHAPTER XII 
The Age of the Renaissance 153 

CHAPTER XIII 
The Renaissance of English Prose .... 168 

CHAPTER XIV 

The Dawn of Lyric Poetry 187 

CHAPTER XV 
The Evolution of the Drama 200 

CHAPTER XVI 
The Age of Elizabeth 213 

CHAPTER XVII 

Sidney and Spenser 225 

CHAPTER XVIII 
The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets .... 247 

CHAPTER XIX 
The Transition to Finished Prose .... 267 

CHAPTER XX 
The Transition to Shakespeare 281 

CHAPTER XXI 
Shakespeare 298 

CHAPTER XXII 

Ben Jonson and his Circle 318 

CHAPTER XXIII 
The Decline of the Drama 336 

CHAPTER XXIV 
The Triumph of Prose 352 

CHAPTER XXV 
The Age of Milton 372 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

EVERY careful teacher of literary history has realized 
keenly the truth of Ten Brink's remark that ** the 
beginner needs a guide in the labyrinth of literature about 
literature." Such a wilderness of criticism and commen- 
tary, of history and biography, of description and con- 
jecture has grown up about the subject of English 
literature that even the most experienced worker is often 
bewildered. It is to furnish some clue to this labyrinth 
that a select list of authorities has been prefixed to every 
chapter and division of this book. 

There has been no attempt at exhaustive bibliographies. 
The practical value of every reference has been carefully 
considered, as well from the standpoints of the availabil- 
ity of the book referred to and its adaptation to the needs 
of beginners, as from that of absolute worth. Often the 
highest authorities on a subject, the works that alone 
would interest the special student, have not been men- 
tioned at all. The publications of the Early English Text 
Society, for instance, of the Chaucer and Shakespeare 
Societies and kindred organizations, the issues of the 
Master of the Rolls, and the costly reprints of old books, 
although of untold value to the specialist, have, for ob- 
vious reasons, been omitted. The student, if he needs 
them, can find them in the large libraries. 

Another group of authorities that has been neglected 
is that list of indispensable reference works that every 
student of English literature should have constantly 



Bibliographical Note 9 

within reach. The minimum list of such helps should 
contain these indispensable works : 

The Encyclopcedia Britannica. 

The Library of British Biography. 

Allibone's Dictioitary of Authors, 

Ryland's Chronological Outlines of English Literature, 

Morley's English Writers, 

Ten Brink's English Literature (Earliest Times to 
Surrey). 

Minto's Characteristics of the English Poets, 
Manual of English Prose Literature, 

Ward's English Poets. 

Craik's Eyiglish Prose. 

Green's Short History of the English People, 

Trail's Social England, 
Taine's English Literature should be within easy reach, 
but it must be read with caution, — it is intoxicating. 

The student should constantly remember that the text- 
book is simply a guide, and that he should in every case 
consult as many authorities upon every topic as his time 
and opportunities will allow. 



The Foundations of English 
Literature 



CHAPTER I 

THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF BRITAIN 

The Element of Insularity. ** Britain," says Shake- 
speare in Cymbeliney ** is a world by itself." It stands, 
he says. 

As Neptune's park, ribbed and paled in 
With rocks unscalable and roaring waters. 

Again he alludes to it m Richard 11. as 

This fortress built by Nature for herself 

Against infection and the hand of war. 

This happy breed of men, this little world, 

This precious stone set in the silver sea, 

\Vhich serves it in the office of a wall 

Or as a moat defensive to a house, 

Against the envy of less happier lands, 

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. 

^'i. This fact of the insularity of Britain has been the 
dominating element in its history. Although the Strait 
of Dover at its narrowest point is only twenty miles in 
width, it formed for centuries an almost impassable bar- 
rier between the island and the continent. No rougher 
and more treacherous body of water than this strait and 



12 The Foundations of English Literature 

Insularity of Britain Its Size and Contour 

the adjacent seas can anywhere be found. The tides in 
places rise more than twenty-five feet, and they sweep 
with fury through the Channel. The North Sea, every- 
where shallow and full of reefs, is subject to sudden 
tempests, the terror of seamen. When Caesar attempted 
the subjugation of Britain, one of these storms swept 
away his transports, ancj a little later a high tide, to- 
gether with a sudden tempest, shattered the greater part 
of his fleet. Any force save a Roman one under a gen- 
eral Hke Caesar would have been destroyed by such a 
disaster. The second expedition was delayed three 
weeks by fierce winds, and after it had reached Britain 
forty transports were wrecked by a sudden gale. When 
Claudius had determined upon the conquest of the island 
he found the Roman army in a state of mutiny. For a 
time it utterly refused to invade a. land protected by such 
fierce and treacherous seas, i 

This insularity of Britain, keeping it free during its 
early history from a mixing of foreign elements, has 
allowed it to evolve a strongly marked individuality, un- 
like that of any other nation of Europe. From the Eng- 
lish conquest to the Norman, a period of six centuries, 
Britain received, with one striking exception, — the intro- 
duction of Christianity, — almost nothing from across the 
Channel. While all Europe was a kaleidoscope of shift- 
ing boundaries, mixing races, changing institutions and 
tongues, England was working out its problem practically 
alone, almost as if it were an island in the unknown Pacific. 

Size and Contour. (Milner, The British Islands.^ 
The area of Britain, when compared with that of the other 
great powers, is almost insignificant. England alone is 
smaller than the single State of North Carolina; com- 



The Physical Geography of Britain 13 

Dominated by the Sea The English Landscape 

bined with Wales it is somewhat larger than the States of 
New York and New Jersey. In shape the island is like 
a distorted pear, or an irregular triangle with a base of 
320 miles and an altitude of some 560 miles. Its contour 
is remarkable. The sea not only girdles it but indents 
it with numberless bays and estuaries which give to the 
island a coast-line three times as long in proportion to 
the land surface as that of any other nation of Europe. 
There is no spot on the entire island more than one 
hundred miles from tide-water. The island was made 
by nature for the home of ships; an eyrie for the sea 
eagles, for the rulers of the Atlantic. The storm-beaten 
seas about it, fierce and treacherous, have been the train- 
ing-school for the sailors of the world. 

The estuaries of Britain played an important part 
during the conquests. They admitted the enemy's ships 
into the very heart of the island. They were the cause, 
too, of some of the earlier subdivisions. Draw a line 
between the Friths of Forth and Clyde, another from the 
Humber to the Mersey, and a third from the Thames to 
the mouth of the Severn, and you will indicate in a rough 
way the boundaries of the three rival kingdoms of North- 
umbria, Mercia, and Wessex. 

The English Landscape. From the eastern shore, which 
in early years was lined with broad marshes, covered at 
low tide but now rescued from the sea, the land gradu- 
ally rises with a pleasant alternation of valley and hill, 
until it culminates in a low mountain chain extending 
the entire length of the western coast. These moun- 
tains, which in Scotland and Wales become wild and 
broken, account for a great part of the present race dis- 
tribution. The territory north of the Friths was never 



14 The Foundations of English Literature 

The English Glebe A Manly Climate 

permanently conquered even by Rome, nor were the 
Welsh ever dislodged from the mountains of the western 
border. To this day the people of Scotland, Wales, and 
Cornwall are prevailingly Celtic. 

Modern England is a garden; hedgerows cover it as 
with a net ; almost every acre of it is utilized. The soil 
has had its own influence upon the molding of the Eng- 
lish mind. It brings forth abundantly, but success comes 
only through skill, and watchfulness, and resolute toil. 
It repays what is expended upon it, but it lavishes no 
unearned gifts. Wrestling for centuries with such a glebe 
has bred in the English yeoman that dogged perseverance, 
that ability to do hard work long continued, that frugality 
and hard-headed sagacity which to-day form such con- 
spicuous elements in his character. 

" A Manly Climate.'' The British Isles lie in almost 
the same latitude as Labrador, yet, owing to the warm 
current of the Gulf Stream, the climate is more like that 
of the Southern Middle States of America, Proximity 
to the sea assures abundant moisture. It rains sometimes 
for weeks at a time, and dense fogs, especially in winter, 
drift in from the ocean. This element of fog and rain has 
been carried to an extreme by Taine, who saw in it an 
explanation for much of the gloom and the seriousness 
of the English character. But, taken for all in all, few 
countries in the world have a more " manly climate." 
It is seldom warm enough to be enervating; it has no 
sharp extremes ; it invites constantly to vigorous and ex- 
hilarating exercise in the open air. In the words of one 
of the English kings, *' There is no other country where 
outdoor exertion may be taken for so many days in the 
year, and for so many hours in the day." The Eng- 



The Physical Geography of Britain 15 

The Element of Environment The English People 

lish have always been a robust race, with large and 
powerful bodies, with enormous appetites — great fighters 
and hunters, ready for anything that has in it a spice 
of danger and of hardship. 

^ This Element of Environment must be kept constantly 
in mind as we study the intellectual life and the literature 
of England. The insularity of Britain has led inevitably 
to an insular view of life. The Englishman is self-satis- 
fied, liable to violent prejudices, intolerant, overbearing. 
Born within sound of the sea, he easily becomes a mariner. 
He has deep in his soul the vague longing, the feeling of 
mystery, the sadness, which a life by the ocean always 
brings. His struggle with a stubborn soil has made him 
obstinate, industrious, a man of immense recoil. He has 
been a healthy man with a perfect digestion, and we find 
that his view of life, while often gloomy, is seldom mor- 
bid and jaundiced. His writings are prevailingly sane 
and wholesome. They abound in a flow of healthy 
animal spirits, they are intensely human ; everywhere are 
expressed a love of action, a sense of freedom, a fierce 
intolerance of oppression. The long residence of the 
English in their narrow island and in an earlier home 
which resembled it in many respects, has given them a 
marked individuality. It is hard to find a people more 
completely the product of its environment. 



CHAPTER II 

PRE-ENGLISH BRITAIN 

COMPARED with most of the other nations of 
Europe, England has had a short history. The 
island first emerges from the mists of fable and conjecture 
about the time of the Christian Era. The year 55 B.C., 
when Caesar first tried to add it to the Roman Empire, is 
the earliest authentic date. It was then peopled by Celts, 
and as this race became an important element in the 
formation of the English people, we will take a swift 
glance at their more marked characteristics. 

The Celts. (Rhys, Celtic Britain ; Skene, Celtic Scot- 
land ; Morley, English Writers, I. ; Matthew Arnold, 
Celtic Literature ; Wright, The Celt, the Roman, and the 
Saxon; Azarius, Development of Old English Thought.) 
As described by the Roman historians, who are almost 
our only authorities, the primitive Britons, while mainly 
of Celtic blood, were by no means a homogeneous people, 
with unvarying physical characteristics, as were the early 
Angles and Saxons. Two main branches have been 
recognized : the Gaels, who included the Irish and the 
Scottish Highlanders, and the Cymry, or Welsh, of whom 
there were at least seven widely different tribes. These 
divisions account for the civil strife which was the curse 
of the Celt as it was afterwards of the Teuton. Petty 
jealousies and feuds kept the flames of war ever burning; 
even when threatened with extermination by the Roman 

16 



Pre-English Britain 17 

Celtic Traits Celtic Literature 

and the Saxon, the Welsh could not unite forces, and 
each invaded section fought its fight alone. 

The individuality of these Celtic Britons was as marked 
and persistent as was that of the Teutons, their neigh- 
bors across the North Sea. The two races were in many- 
ways supplements of each other. The Teutons were 
stolid, undemonstrative, and serious. They were not 
quick to anger, but when once aroused their wrath was 
implacable. They could bide their time; they were 
tenacious of purpose, and not easily discouraged. They 
were fatalists : their view of life was dark and cheerless. 
The Celts, however, were vivacious and imaginative. 
Brave even to recklessness, they were unstable and easily 
discouraged. " When injured," says Tacitus, '' their 
resentment is quick, sudden, and impatient " ; but they 
harbored no lasting resentments. They were sanguine 
and confident, yet their ardor soon cooled. Time and 
again during the conquest they failed because they 
neglected to follow up an advantage. They were a light- 
hearted people: the word ** fun " is one of the few addi- 
tions that they have made to our vocabulary. They 
were singularly sensitive to things of beauty. Music es- 
pecially dehghted them ; the harp to this day is the 
emblem of Ireland. Their religion, while cruel and re- 
volting in some of its phases, was full of poetry and 
mysticism, and was peculiarly fitted to impress the im- 
agination. In literature the Celts had made considerable 
advances even before the English conquest. Their ritual, 
which perished with the Druids, was in itself a literature. 
While the Teutons were shouting wild songs of battle and 
booty, the Celts were weaving prose romances of love and 
fairy-land, of Arthur and Merlin, and making a literature 



1 8 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Celt and the Teuton Caesar's Conquest 

SO full of beauty and of true creative energy that it has 
been the inspiration of all the great English poets of later 
days. Thus the Celtic element has had a marked influ- 
ence upon the formation of the English character. With- 
out it England might have become another Holland, 
— stolid, industrious, ponderous, serious, — without humor 
or fancy. 

In temperament, manner of thought, and mode of expression, no two 
peoples could better present a type of permanent contrast, or preserve those 
idiosyncrasies which when stimulated against each other by national rivalry 
(as in France and Germany) tend only to discord and distrust, but when 
blended (as in Britain) are the foundation of national stability, whether in 
action, art, or letters. The masculine tenderness of the Teuton, the femi- 
nine of the Celt ; the affection for nature, associated in the Teuton with 
love of exercise and the open air, in the Celt with spiritual sympathy ; the 
epic impressiveness of the Teuton, and the dramatic effectiveness of the 
Celt ; the elaborate synthesis and detail of the first, with the conciseness 
and grasp of principle of the other ; the complex style of the Teuton and 
the nervous utterance of the Celt ; the mysticism of the Teuton where the 
Celt is realistic, his seriousness where the Celt is sportive and fanciful — 
these are some of the qualities which go to make up the richness of the 
literature, and are so important in conjunction because so complementary 
to each other. — Renton. 

Suggested Reading. 1.3m&r's The Bo/s Mabinogion. 

The Roman Domination. (Lappenberg, Anglo-Saxon 
Kings, Part I. ; Green, The Conquest of England ; Coote, 
The Romans of Britain.^ The so-called conquest of Brit- 
ain by Caesar in 55 and 54 B.C. was by no means a signifi- 
cant event. Like a band of pirates the Romans landed, 
burned, plundered, and sailed away, leaving behind them 
no noticeable results save a small area of ruin. For 
nearly a century the Britons went on as before, un- 
molested by Rome. They increased their commerce 



Pre-English Britain 19 



Roman Domination Withdrawal of the Romans 

with the continent; London and other towns sprang into 
prominence as commercial centers ; and under Cymbeline, 
the father of the noted chief Caractacus, the whole island 
arrived at something like a centralized government. Civ- 
ilization was increasing rapidly, and the natives were be- 
coming, as Shakespeare declares, 

Men more order'd than when Julius Cj£sar 
Smiled at their lack of skill, but found their courage 
Worthy his frowning at. 

In 43 A.D., the Emperor Claudius determined upon the 
conquest of the island toward which the Romans had 
cast longing eyes for nearly a century. ^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^.^^ 
Forty years of stubborn warfare followed, of Britain. 

di . I ^ •■u fj. i-t- 5°' Defeat of Caracta- 

urmg which one tribe after another was ^^^^ 

crushed by the Roman legions, until the 61. Destruction of the 

final battle with the Caledonians left Boadic'ea. 

Britain so thoroughly conquered that it 78-^4- Administration 

, . . , . ofAgricola. 

remained in comparative peace durmg 84. complete submis- 
the next three centuries. sion of Britain. 

The same methods that had made France and Spain 
so thoroughly Roman were at once applied to the con- 
quered province. Military roads were constructed in 
every direction, making it easy to mass troops at short 
notice in any quarter of the island. Towns were fortified 
and garrisoned, and within the protected area there 
sprang up temples and baths, palaces and other splendid 
structures, filled with all the appliances and luxuries of 
Roman civilization. Harbors were dredged, marshes 
drained, and the soil tilled by scientific g^s, invasion of visi- 
methods. Thus passed three hundred goths. 

• c ^u ric^-u 395- Final Division of 

years. At the opening of the fifth cen- the Empire. 



20 The Foundations of English Literature 

Failure of Latin Civilization The Barbarian Age 

410. Sack of Rome by ^urv the Teutonic tribes of Western 

Alaric. r- 1 T^ , 

451, Invasion of the Europe began to press upon Rome until 
Huns under Attiia ^j^g ^^^ ^^g f orced to battle f or mere 

455. Sack of Rome by "^ 

the Vandals. cxistence. The more distant provinces 

''"• ^^'r.°^' w ^."" of the Empire began to be abandoned; 

pire of the West. ^ ^ ^ 

Beginning of the Mid- little by little the army was called from 
die Ages. Britain. By 409, according to the Anglo- 

Saxon Chronicle, the greater part of the Roman popu- 
lation had left the island. 

Aside from purely physical changes, the Roman 
occupation of Britain left few permanent marks. Not- 
withstanding the fact that during three centuries, a period 
longer than that since the settlement of America, Romans 
and Britons lived side by side, that every effort was 
made to force the natives into the towns and to teach 
them the Latin language and literature, at the close of 
the period the territory outside the fortified cities was 
almost as Celtic as before the conquest. The Latin lan- 
guage was spoken in the island much as English is spoken 
at the present time in India, — to some extent in the 
cities, but scarcely at all in the country. As the Angles 
and Saxons fell with peculiar ferocity upon Roman towns 
and in most cases utterly destroyed them with their in- 
habitants, they thus took the most effective means possible 
for stamping out the last vestiges of Latin civilization . 
The period of the Roman domination, therefore, need 
not detain us, since it affected very little the subsequent 
history of Britain. 

Required Reading. Shakespeare's Cymbeline, IIL, i. 

The Barbarian Age. During her whole history Rome, 
with her outlying provinces, was an area of civilization 



Pre-English Britain 21 

The Saxon Pirates Heroic Defense of the Britons 

surrounded by an unbroken circle of barbarism. It was 
like an artificial province rescued by dykes from the sea. 
The waters are kept at bay only by ceaseless toil and 
vigilance ; they never sleep, but are constantly gnawing 
at the embankments, ready at any moment to rush in at 
the weakest point and engulf the whole. While Rome 
was in her strength there was no danger, but when, 
weakened by excesses and political corruption, she lost 
her power, the whole barbarian world began to close in 
upon her. It was so in Britain. During the Roman 
supremacy the wild tribes of Scotland and the North of 
Ireland had been held back. Time and again had it 
taken the whole force of the army to drive them over 
the border. So persistent were these attacks that the 
Romans in self-defense built at two different points mas- 
sive walls across the entire frontier. The eastern coast, 
also, had been rendered safe only by constant vigilance. 
Bands of Saxon pirates, even as early as the middle of 
the third century, had poured from the lowlands of North 
Germany, and had kept the entire coast-line in terror. 
So serious did this danger become that the Emperors 
Diocletian and Maximian appointed a " Count of the 
Saxon Shore," whose whole duty it was to fortify the 
coast and to ward off the attacks of these marauders. 

No sooner had the Roman legions departed from the 
island than the barbarians began to close in upon it. 
First came the fierce tribes from Ireland and Scotland, 
and shortly afterwards came the Saxon pirates so long 
kept at bay. Well might they look with eager eyes 
upon Britain. It had been rich enough to tempt the 
Romans, and to keep them for five centuries, and it had 
grown constantly richer with every year since the con- 



22 The Foundations of English Literature 

A Study of the Saxon Tribes 

quest of Agricola. Nor was it plunder alone that tempted 
these wild seamen. The island was a natural fortress, 
such as their own land, open on the south, could never 
be. It was made by nature as the home of sea kings ; 
whoever ruled it would be ruler of the North Sea and of 
the Eastern Atlantic. 

The Britons fought desperately, but they lacked unity 
and leadership. It is a mistaken idea that they had lost 
their old spirit and that they were without arms. It 
took a century and a half of almost constant fighting for 
the English to gain even the eastern side of the island. 
Every foot of ground was heroically contested, sometimes 
several times over. No more stubborn resistance was 
ever made by an invaded people. 

As these pirates from the North of Europe became the 
founders of the modern English nation, we will stop at 
this point to make a careful study of their early environ- 
ment, their habits, their institutions, their temper, and 
their view of life. 



CHAPTER III 

THE PRIMITIVE ENGLISHMAN 

The Land. If one examine a map of the Danish penin- 
sula (see Century Dictionary Atlas), he will note that it 
lies like a long finger slightly curved and pointing at the 
coast of Sweden. It is comparatively narrow, averaging 
not over fifty miles in width; it is jagged everywhere 
with bays and studded with islands. It has three divi- 
sions : Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, which correspond 
roughly with the territories once occupied by the Jutes, 
the Angles, and the Saxons. The little province between 
the towns of Flensburg and Schleswig still bears the name 
of Angeln, or England. The land of the Jutes was a fen 
country with vast swamps and dense forests; the southern 
half of the peninsula, although bordered by wide sea- 
marshes, rose into low, heath-clad hills well fitted for 
flocks and herds; while the Saxon territory, which ex- 
tended along the coast as far as the Rhine, was as low as 
Jutland and ** shagged everywhere with forests." On 
the whole, it was a gloomy, foggy land ; a land of fens, 
wide moors — the haunt of water-fowl — dense woods full 
of wild boars, stags, and wolves; a land dominated by 
the sea, whose winter roar penetrated every part, whose 
salt spray drifted over all things ; a land bathed for a few 
months in almost incessant rain and mist, and swept for 
the rest of the year by icy blasts. 

The Germania of Tacitus. The earliest picture that we 
have of the inhabitants of these lowlands of Europe is 

23 



24 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Germans of Tacitus Teutonic Traits 

that furnished by Tacitus, who wrote his Germania, A.D. 
98. The Germans, as he called all the tribes north of 
Gaul, were ** a race pure, unmixed, and stamped with a 
distinct character. Hence a family Hkeness pervades the 
whole, though their numbers are so great : eyes stern and 
blue; ruddy hair; large bodies powerful in sudden exer- 
tions, but impatient of toil and labor." Their land 
abounded in flocks and herds, which were their only 
wealth. In battle they were fierce and determined, rush- 
ing to the onslaught with terrible cries and hoarse songs. 
** It is reproach and infamy during a whole succeeding 
life to retreat from the field, leaving their chief. To aid, 
to protect him, to place their own gallant actions to the 
account of his glory, is their first and most sacred engage- 
ment." ** They suppose somewhat of sanctity and 
prescience to be inherent in the female sex"; "the 
matrimonial bond is strict and severe"; ** they live 
fenced about with chastity." As to their daily habits 
of life, Tacitus observes that ** as soon as they arise from 
sleep, which they generally protract till late in the day, 
they bathe, . . . take their meal, each on a distinct 
seat, and at a separate table. Then they proceed armed 
to business, and not less frequently to convivial parties, 
in which it is no disgrace to pass days and nights, with- 
out intermission, in drinking. The frequent quarrels 
that arise amongst them, when intoxicated, seldom 
terminate in abusive language but more frequently in 
blood." 

Suggested Reading. Tacitus, Germania, Oxford Edi- 
tion. 

Beowulf. (Ten Brink, i., 23; Morley, i.,6; Brooke, 
Early English Literature, 12-74). But we do not have 



The Primitive Englishman 25 

The Saga of Beowulf A Song of Battle and Blood 

to depend alone on the testimony of Roman historians 
who at best could have had only a superficial knowledge 
of the subject. This early Englishman has given us a 
picture of himself which stands complete. To gain any- 
thing like a clear conception of these dwellers in the Ger- 
man forests we must go to Beowulf^ doubtless the oldest 
poem in the English language, and indeed in any modern 
European tongue. Scholars differ as to its date, but it 
is generally supposed to have been composed before the 
English conquest and passed on by tradition during 
several centuries till it was finally put into writing in 
some of the early monasteries, perhaps in Northumbria. 
Mutilated as it has been by time and by Christian copy- 
ists, who freely inserted pious antidotes for its heathen- 
ism, it nevertheless breathes the very soul of those fierce 
seamen who in the fifth and sixth centuries laid the 
foundations of the English nation. Here we have the 
Teuton untouched by extraneous influences; here we 
have the child not afraid to be himself, not concealed by 
artificial forms and requirements ; here we have the Eng- 
lishman stripped of fifteen centuries of culture. To get 
at the heart of things we must turn to this old saga. 

He who reads Beowulf XSxxom^ at a sitting goes away 
with a maze of impressions. It is a song of blood, of 
battle, of wassailing, of the sea. The clang of battle- 
sarks ; the flash of war-bills ; black ships darting over the 
foaming currents ; warriors boasting and bragging ; horses 
racing at furious speed ; fen-moors, windy nesses ; blood 
in torrents, — the waters boiHng with it; the roll and 
welter of waves ; nickers and fen-stalkers; hoarse shouts 
of drunken warriors at the mead-benches ; scops and glee- 
men ** yelling out the joys of fight " — a confusion of 



26 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Landscape of Beowulf The North Sea 

graphic pictures following each other fast, a wild land- 
scape seen by lightning flashes on a black night. 

The landscape in Beowulf is vague and vast. There 
are no tilled fields, — all is wild, weird, stirring. It is a 
land of " mist-covered fen-moors," " sea-cliffs gleaming, 
precipitous mountains, nesses enormous," " blustering 
bluffs." The inland regions are unknown and terrible; 
how can mere words hold more of uncanny suggestion 
than those giving the description of the haunts of Grendel? 

They guard the wolf-coverts, 
Lands inaccessible, wind-beaten nesses, 
Fearfulest fen-deeps, where a flood from the mountains 
'Neath mists of the nesses netherward rattles. 
The stream under earth : not far is it henceward 
Measured by mile-lengths that the mere-water standeth, 
Which forests hang over, with frost-whiting covered, 
A firm-rooted forest, the floods overshadow. 
There ever at night one an ill-meaning portent 
A fire-flood may see ; 'mong children of men 
None liveth so wise as wot of the bottom ; 
Though harassed by hounds the heath-stepper seek for, 
Fly to the forest, firm-antlered he-deer. 
Spurred from afar, his spirit he yieldeth, 
His life on the shore, ere he will venture 
To cover his head. Uncanny the place is : 
Thence upward ascendeth the surging of waters, 
Wan to the welkin, when the wind is stirring 
The weathers unpleasing till the air groweth gloomy, 
And the heavens lower. ^ 

Before this vague land lay the sea, a welter of waters, 
cold, dark, storm-troubled. Everywhere in the poem 
are ** wave-deeps tossing, fighting the fierce wind " ; ice- 
bonds that close the currents ; the return of spring, and 

^ Dr. Hall's translation. 



The Primitive Englishman 27 

The Prehistoric Teuton His Fatalism and Gloom 

the sea-rovers, winter- weary, eager for new wandering; 
** the waves twisting the sea on the sands " ; fleet ships, 
— ** ocean-wood," — " foamy-necked, fanned by the 
breezes," gliding like sea-birds over the ** fallow flood " ; 
the dead sea-king in his best ship set adrift, given " to 
the god of storms." 

In this environment, against this background, move a 
wild people, teeming with animal life, — Titanic, somber. 
They have no nerves, no pity, no fancy. They are serious 
and earnest. Their appetites are enormous ; they eat to 
repletion, drink to drunkenness, and then sleep heavily 
upon the mead-benches. Hoarse shouts of revelry echo 
from every page. Their dream of earthly happiness is to 
be surrounded by heroes, to bathe in a surfeit of slaugh- 
ter, and after the battle to divide the booty, to lavish 
gifts upon each other, to sit in the mead-hall drinking 
and boasting while ** bench glee " and carousing run 
wild. The crowning desire of King Hrothgar's life was 

To urge his folk to found a great building, 

A mead-hall grander than men of the era 

Ever had heard of, and in it to share 

With young and old all of the blessings 

The Lord had allowed him save life and retainers.' 

Blood and slaughter run through the poem like a scarlet 
thread: ** seething soul gore," '* sword-drink," ** hottest 
of war-sweats " — over and over the idea is repeated. Al- 
most every trait of character mentioned by Tacitus is here 
portrayed, often in pictures as realistic as photographs: 
the liegeman who will die before he will desert his lord ; 
the honor everywhere paid to women, who are admitted 
to the mead-halls, and who even make speeches to the 

^ Dr. Hall's translation. 



28 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Plaint of Hrothgar Teutonic Honesty and Simplicity 

warriors ; the quarrels that arise among intoxicated revel- 
ers. As in Tacitus, we have the record of a whole day 
with all its occupations from morn till midnight. 

The view of life taken by these men was cheerless and 
stoical. A level gloom is the atmosphere of the poem. 
It begins and ends with a funeral ; there is in it not a 
laughing voice, nor a singing bird, nor a word of pity or 
of hope. A keen sense of the brevity of life hung heavily 
over these primitive men. Death was the great horror 
not because they shrank from its physical terrors, nor be- 
cause it snatched its victim to scenes he knew not of, but 
because it was the time for ** the leaving of life-joys." 
Man was in the hands of the weirds, and why should he 
struggle ? Fate would take him when his days were 
numbered, and not before. The plaint of the aged 
Hrothgar is typical : 

Beware of arrogance, world-famous champion ! 
But a little while lasts thy life-vigor's fullness ; 
'T will after hap early, that illness or sword-edge 
Shall part thee from strength, or the grasp of the fire, 
Or the wave of the current, or clutch of the edges, 
Or flight of the war-spear, or age with its horrors. 
Or thine eyes' bright flashing shall fade into darkness : 
'T will happen full early, excellent hero, 
That death shall subdue thee.* 

But there is a primitive sweetness, a simplicity of view, 
a true pathos, an honesty about the poem that is most 
delightful. These old Teutons, with all their fierceness, 
appetite, and gloom, were true men, as wholesome as 
nature herself. Compared with the civilized nations to 
the south, they were purity personified. They were full 
of a vigorous animal health, uncorrupted, unweakened; 

' Dr. Hall's translation. 



The Primitive Englishman 29 

The Teutonic Creed Readings in Beowulf 

they were virtuous, sincere, and deeply religious. Their 
creed, reduced to its lowest terms, was to vanquish and 
destroy, yet it had its roots in the sincere conviction that 
the non-warlike man was an inferior, a degenerate. Con- 
tempt for civilization became a religious sentiment, and 
crushed out all pity ; but all this feeling was honest and 
sincere, and when turned into right channels it could but 
result in sterling character. 

Required Reading. Beowulf, Dr. Hall's translation, 
in connection with the Germania and Emerson's English 
Traits, which is a study of the modern Englishman made 
from an impartial standpoint by a master. 



CHAPTER IV 

ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN 

The Dark Period, 44.9-5^7. (York Powell, Early 
England; Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain; Morley, vols. 
i. and ii.) The year 449 is to England what 1607 is to 
America, — it marks the close of the century of incursions 
for plunder and the opening of the new period of settle- 
ment. The century and a half following this date was in 
every respect a time of darkness : it was Christianity in a 
death struggle with heathenism ; it was an era unrecorded. 
The Roman historians were silent ; the invaders almost 
to a man could neither read nor write, and the Celtic 
monks, who alone could have preserved the record, chose 
not to chronicle the shame of their race. Only one con- 
temporary document is left us, the doleful lamentations 
of the monk Gildas, ** the British Jeremiah," which con- 
tain here and there snatches of what is undoubtedly 
genuine history. 

On the whole we can judge of the conquest only by 

studying its results. It was not a movement that hap- 

457. Hengist Founds pencd all at once ; it was not a tidal wave 

^^^*,'i ^ A that swept rapidly over the island ; it 

490. EllaFounds ^ r J ' 

South Saxony. was the slow work of a century and a 
^^wesYex!^ °"" ^ ^^^^- '^^^ ranks of the invaders were 
520 (?). Death of King comparatively small and their landings 
54rida Founds King- wcre Scattered both as to time and terri- 

dom of Bernicia. tory. Each Settlement was in a way in- 

545-560. Gildas' His- - i ^ r ^i ^i ^i 

tory. dependent of the others; there was no 

30 



Anglo-Saxon Britain 31 

Three Groups of Settlements Extermination of the Welsh 

concert, no unity of forces. It was like 
the settlement of America by scattered 57i.^uffa Founds East 
colonies working each for its own end. 586. cndda Founds 
There were, in time, at least seven of these 
colonies along the eastern and southern shores, and these, 
as in colonial America, fell roughly into three groups: 
the northern colonies, the middle, and the southern. A 
common grievance drew the Americans early into a union, 
but union came to the English kingdoms only after cen- 
turies of strife. 

The wars with the Welsh were fierce and cruel. Like 
the Indians of America in later years, they were driven 
gradually backward until they were forced to make their 
last stand in the mountains of the extreme west. Vast 
numbers of them were slain. The women and the hum- 
blest of the peasantry escaped the general slaughter; 
they were retained as wives and slaves — but the fighting 
men were almost completely exterminated. So merci- 
lessly were they crushed that they lost their language and 
even, their identity: only about thirty words of early 
Celtic origin have survived in our language, and these 
are almost wholly connected with the lowest forms of 
manual toil. But the Celtic element, though it can never 
be estimated accurately, must constantly be reckoned 
with. In Kent it is small ; in Wales it is very large ; in 
no part of England is it wholly wanting. 

The Struggle for Unity, ^gy-828. (Lappenburg, Anglo- 
Saxon Kings. ^ The history of the next two centuries 
need not detain us. The long drama 617-633. Eadwine. 
of the conquest was practically over ; the He^r''"^ ^' ''' 
English for the first time were dominant 664. council at whit- 
in England ; but the land lay in a chaos ^' 



32 The Foundations of English Literature 



Struggle for the Overlordship No Real Union 

668-690. Theodore, ^f petty kingdoms, each with an inde- 

Archbishop of Can- , , 

terbury. pcndcnt rulcr. A clash was inevitable. 

680. caedmon ^^^Q should be the greatest,— the Bret- 

685. Beginningof , ° ' 

Northumbrian De- walder, the wielder of Britain ? The 

*^^ D^eathofBaeda Q^Gstion was soon answercd in part: it 
758-796. offa. Mercia must be the king of Northumbria, of 
,8rDa"s p";t Visit Mercia, or of Wessex. The lead was at 

England. once taken by Northumbria, and under 

^landuiTd^lr^Ecgb^rht Eadwine there began the first brilliant era 

of Wessex. in Anglo-Saxon history. Patriotism, 

bounded it is true by province lines, ran high ; laws, edu- 
cation, literature, arts, began to flourish. In less than a 
century Northumbria had become the intellectual leader 
not only of England but of Europe as well. But the 
political power of the north was soon crushed by Mercia, 
and Mercia in turn succumbed to Wessex. 

As we read of the struggles between these great powers, 

we seem to see a chaos of fierce armies, 

'tfof ."hT'prerh and, one after another, the figures of co- 

Monarchy. lossal men pushcd up for a moment above 

^homrt? ° ^ the mass of shouting warriors only to be 

732. The Moors De- pulled down and replaced by other figures 

752. Pepin, King of OH the shouldcrs of othcr armies. It was 

the Franks. the era of the kings. The overlordship 

800. Charlemagne. <. ti 1 t • t 

followed no laws as to succession. It 
depended wholly on the personal ability of the king who 
laid claim to it. Under such conditions the island be- 
came a battle-ground, a school for kings, for great leaders 
of men. 

At the close of the era the unity of England was almost 
as far away as when it commenced. Even when Wessex 
had gathered all the kingdoms into a loose confederacy 



Anglo-Saxon Britain 2>3 

Roman Missionaries Arrive Spread of Christianity 

that owned Ecgberht as supreme lord, there was no real 
union. Each province maintained its own tribal organi- 
zation and obeyed its own king. An intense sectionalism 
had been caused by the struggle for the overlordship ; 
patriotism was bounded by province lines ; to them union 
meant simply conquest and added territory for the glory 
of their own little kingdom. The two centuries of war- 
fare had accustomed the English mind to the thought of 
a single master of Britain, but they had done little more. 
T/ie Christian Conquest, jg'j-686. (Bright, Early Eng- 
lish Church History ; Azarius, Development of Old English 
Thought ; Milman, Latin Christianity, Bk. iv., ch. 4, 
Bk. v., ch. 10.) While this noisy combat of king with 
king was in full career, a silent force, one that was des- 
tined to revolutionize the English mind, was at work 
among the kingdoms. In the year 597, at the very open- 
ing of the era of the kings, there arrived at the old land- 
ing-place in Kent, that gateway through which has come 
nearly everything destined to work deep changes in Brit- 
ain, a little band of Roman monks sent by Pope Gregory 
to Christianize the island. Never was there an under- 
taking that seemed more visionary and hopeless. As 
viewed from Rome, Britain seemed to lie at the world's 
end, and its inhabitants were believed to be utterly law- 
less and savage, — the wildest people in Europe. Before 
the exodus to Britain they had never come into contact 
with Rome, and during a century and a half in the island 
they had received almost nothing from southern civiliza- 
tion. Their wars were waged for extermination, and 
when the Welsh had been torn to pieces the wolves had 
fallen with fury upon one another. Thus it looked from 
Rome, but the earliest messengers from Augustine to the 



34 The Foundations of English Literature 

Causes for its Acceptance Harmonized with Teutonic Ideals 

Pope conveyed the great news that the king of Kent and 
ten thousand of his subjects had at once received baptism. 
Gradually but surely the new religion worked northward 
and westward, until within less than a century every 
corner of Britain had been brought within the pale of the 
Roman Church. 

The causes of the prompt acceptance of Christianity by 
these barbaric tribes are easily found. They were chil- 
dren of nature, almost untouched by civilization, — credu- 
lous, susceptible. The magnificent organization of the 
Roman Church, its solemn sacraments, its symbolism, its 
pomp and show, impressed them greatly. The Roman 
monks appealed constantly to their credulity: Baeda's 
history of the early English Church is almost a book of 
miracles. It was soon found that it was no hard thing 
to accept the new faith ; it required no rooting-up of age- 
old beliefs and the substitution of new and startling ideas. 
The Teutonic tribes had always been serious and reflec- 
tive : they had believed in a future life, and in the pre- 
siding influences of good and evil. They had ever been 
honest, and chaste, and loyal to friends and kin. To 
accept Christianity was but to change the names of their 
gods and their forms of worship. Christ was to them but 
another name for the gentle and gracious Balder; Woden 
was found to be after all only the earliest ancestor of 
their kings; and the Virgin corresponded perfectly with 
their ideal of true womanhood. Their great nature festi- 
vals of Yuletide and Eostratide could be easily changed 
into celebrations of the birth and the resurrection of 
Christ. But the sincerity and the purity of the early 
Roman missionaries were, perhaps, after all, the leading 
factors in the christianizing of the island. More self- 



Anglo-Saxon Britain 35 

Humanizing Effects of Christianity Civil Effects 

^sacrificing and courageous men never bore the gospel 
into heathendom. The breadth and greatness, the 
grandeur and high solemnity of their message, together 
with the purity, enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, and consistency 
of their own lives, would have accomplished its end 
among any people. 

This noiseless revolution, in the greatness of its re- 
sults, is second to no other in English history. It was 
the first leaven from Roman Europe that had come 
into the lump of Teutonic barbarism, and, wherever it 
touched, it humanized and civilized. Wars went on 
as before, but their character was changed. There was 
no more extermination, no more battle for mere booty. 
From being out of contact with all the external world, 
the English now came into touch with Rome, the 
spiritual and intellectual center of civilization. The 
Roman monks and priests brought in books, and art, 
and culture. Monasteries began to arise, — influential 
centers where students gathered, where learning and art 
were cultivated, where perpetual peace reigned. Sel- 
dom has any one influence so transformed a people. In 
two centuries Britain was changed from a bloody battle- 
field on which shouted wild, unlettered savages, into the 
intellectual center of Europe, the leader of the world's 
best thought and civilization. 

The influence of Christianity in cementing the English 
kingdoms into a unity must not be overlooked. The 
Council of Whitby, which determined that the Roman 
and not the Celtic type of Christianity was to prevail, 
was the first important step. Under Theodore all Eng- 
land was welded into one spiritual kingdom. The head 
of the Church was at Canterbury. Here the ecclesiasti- 



36 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Second Teutonic Conquest Barbarity of the Danes 

cal synods drew the kingdoms into a parliament where 
canons were enacted to affect England as a whole. It 
was, therefore, no long step from the thought of the 
single spiritual throne at Canterbury to that of a single 
temporal throne and a united England. 

The Supremacy of Wessex, 828-101 j, *' The wars of the 
kites and crows," as Milton termed the two centuries of 
conflict for the overlordship, were brought suddenly to 
an end by a most unlooked-for and overwhelming disaster. 
The Teutonic tribes on the Baltic, in Jutland and Scan- 
dinavia, the old home of the English, after three centuries 
of obscurity, again turned their keels westward, and the 
old drama of the conquest was repeated in almost every 
detail. Again an era of sudden incursions, of ruthless 
slaughter, of wholesale pillage ; again an era of conquest 
and settlement ; and again, still later, an era of political 
subjugation. To realize what the three centuries on 
British soil had done for the Anglo-Saxon tribes, one has 
but to compare them with these fierce sea-wolves of the 
ninth and tenth centuries, who were in blood, in speech, 
in views of life, in religion, customs, and temperament 
but a repetition of the hordes that had poured into Eng- 
land under Hengist and Ida. ** The first sight of the 
Northmen," says Green, " is as if the hand on the dial 
of history had gone back three hundred years." North- 
umbria was ravaged with fire and sword until almost every 
vestige of culture was blotted out, and then, like a swarm 
of locusts, the invaders turned southward. The flimsy 
nature of the union between the kingdoms became at 
once apparent. From first to last there was no united 
resistance. Each invaded section fought for life unaided 
by neighbors, just as the Welsh had done in earlier years. 



Anglo-Saxon Britain 37 



The Rise of Wessex Danish Supremacy 

A united kingdom, in the sense that we now use the 
term, was undreamed of. 

Slowly the black shadow of barbarism crept over the 
English map ; but in the meantime a new force was 
arising in England. The close of the era 867. Danes conquer 
of the kings had seen Wessex in the lead, ^y^^l^^ '^ifr'^d. 
Under Ecgberht there had been for the 874- Danes conquer 
first time a union of all English kingdoms. 878. Danes invade 
This powerful ore^anizer had learned king- wessex ; Defeated 

r . 1 r 1 ^11 byiElfred. 

craft m the court of the great Charle- gi2. Northmen settle 
magne ; he was in full sympathy with the Normandy. 

'.. . ., •" \.-u r-U 1 959. Dunstan, Arch- 

new pohtical ideas across the Channel, bishop of canter- 

and he was able to organize his domain, ^"^y- 

, ° 980. Death of Dun- 

in accordance with these ideas, to such a stan. wessex at 
degree that he could at last do the un- ^^s height. 

<=* 994. Invasion of Danes 

precedented thing of handing down the under swein. 
overlordship to his successors. Under '"l^^^^l f„"/;-^ 
him, despite the omnipresent Dane that 1016-1042. Danish 
hung like a millstone upon the island, .J^Zlee. Last Eng- 
there began a new era for England. iJsh Kings. 
Under Alfred, a grandson of Ecgberht, Wessex took 
another step forward. The Danes were checked in their 
victorious career, and a line was drawn beyond which 
they might not go. The little kingdom became the head 
of England in every sense : it was the only section un- 
conquered by the Danes, the only section where learning 
and literature and law still existed. The hearts of its 
people began to throb with pride and patriotism. For 
nearly a century after Alfred's time the Danish move- 
ment upon the island ceased, and little by little the king- 
dom of Wessex wrested the north from the invaders. In 
time something like a national spirit began to awaken 



38 The Foundations of English Literature 

Importance of the Danish Epoch The Formative Era 

among all the English tribes. The tenth century wit- 
nessed the glory of Wessex, as the seventh had witnessed 
that of Northumbria. The two brief eras stand out in 
bright relief when we look down the dreary perspective 
of Anglo-Saxon history. 

The Danish Supremacy^ ioij-1066. But like North- 
umbria two centuries before, Wessex fell at length into 
weak hands. Alfred and his immediate successors had 
kept the Dane within bounds by vigorous action ; the 
later kings secured immunity from attack by the payment 
of heavy tribute, and it became only a matter of time 
when the inevitable result would follow. An act of 
treachery precipitated the calamity. In 1013 the North- 
man was supreme in England ; Cnut, the leader, became 
king, and the Danish dream of a great Scandinavian 
empire, embracing all the lands about the North Sea, 
bade fair to be realized. Until 1066, when William, 
himself a Northman, took possession of England, the 
Dane was the leading factor in English politics. 

The short period of Danish supremacy need not be dis- 
cussed at length, yet it cannot be overlooked by the 
student seeking the elements that have made the English 
people. It was simply throwing into the crucible new 
masses of crude ore, of fresh raw material. It greatly 
retarded the process of evolution — it was a positive 
setback, even ; but it introduced no new element, and it 
did not change the character of the final product. The 
Angles and Saxons had found the Welsh utterly different 
from themselves, and they had mingled with them to no 
appreciable degree ; but the Danes found in the English 
a people differing from themselves only in degree of 
civilization, and barbarism soon yielded to the stronger 



Anglo-Saxon Britain 39 

The Englishman An Evolution 

force of enlightenment. Gradually they learned the lan- 
guage, not much different from their own ; they accepted 
Christianity as readily as had the Anglo-Saxons; they 
took English wives; they mingled freely with the con- 
quered people, and in time their national identity was 
swallowed up completely. 

The Formative Era. Between Hengist and William the 
Conqueror lies a period of six centuries, — a period five 
times as long as our own national history. Its impor- 
tance need not be dwelt upon. It was the formative era 
in English history. At its opening we see barbaric 
hordes, at its close we have what is essentially the Eng- 
lishman of to-day. Other elements were to be added, 
but they were to work no fundamental changes. The 
English had evolved themselves ; seldom has there been 
a people that has arisen from barbarism to enlightenment 
with so little help from outside hands. One important 
element, that of Christianity, had come from abroad, but 
nevertheless it is safe to say with Duruy that ** from the 
time when the Roman power had been broken until the 
moment when William the Conqueror brought the British 
Isles again under continental dominion, England's rela- 
tions with the rest of Europe were slight." It was this 
that gave the Englishman his peculiar personality, his- 
views of life, his estimate of values, so different from 
those of other Europeans. 



CHAPTER V 

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

I. The Primal Poetry 

The Scop. (Brooke, History of Early English Litera- 
ture ; Morley, English Writers, vol. ii. ; Azarius, De- 
velopment of Old English Thought ; Earle, Anglo-Saxon 
Literature.) To a greater extent than that of almost 
any other nation, save perhaps Greece, the literature of 
England has been an evolution. In everything that per- 
tained to mental culture the Englishman began at tjie 
lowest elements, and in a corner of the world, almost out 
of contact with all others, educated himself. The story 
of his earliest lispings will never be known. When, 
through the aid of Tacitus, we first catch sight of him, 
he has already made an advance, — he goes into battle 
singing rude songs of heroism and boasting. Still later, 
in Beowulf J we see him again in his bardic age. First of 
all a warrior, his loftiest ideals are connected with physi- 
cal bravery, with power, with glory. Kings and heroes 
love to hear chanted the praises of their own prowess and 
the glory of their ancestry. A class of professional sing- 
ers has arisen, — scops, or gleemen, — who wander, like the 
rhapsodists of Homeric days, from court to court, chant- 
ing from memory or improvising at will wild songs of 
" battle and bale," accompanying themselves upon the 
** glee-beam," and stirring their hearers as with trumpets. 
On the joyous morning after Beowulf had cleared Heorot 
of Grendel, the gleeman of the hall, 

40 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 41 

The Wandering Singer Few Songs Preserved 

a thane of the folk-lord, 
Who ancient traditions treasured in memory, 
New word-groups found properly bound : 
The bard after 'gan then Beowulf's venture 
Wisely to tell of, and words that were clever 
To utter skilfully, earnestly speaking.^ 

This gleeman was a singer stationed permanently in the 
court of the king. In The Lament of Dear we have the 
complaint of such a gleeman after he has been supplanted 
in the king's favor by another singer more skilful or more 
popular. But more frequently the scop was a wanderer 
like Widsith who 

Far traveled through strange lands and learnt 
Of good and evil in the spacious world, 
Parted from home friends and dear kindred,^ 

Such a wanderer was eagerly welcomed wherever he 
went. He brought news, gossip, entertainment. He 
was poet, novelist, singer, actor, newspaper, all in one. 
Through a long era the scop ruled supreme in every 
realm of literature. 

The poetry of this prehistoric epoch was not written. 
It was transmitted orally from generation to generation 
as were the earliest murmurings of Greek song. The few 
mutilated leaves that have survived the blasts of more 
than a thousand winters represent but a pitiful fragment 
of that minstrelsy that made joyous those long hypobo- 
rean evenings, — the twilight of history. Moreover, the 
little that survives is far from its original form. The 
songs, since they were not written, changed constantly. 
All the specimens now extant are in Anglo-Saxon, a lan- 

^ Dr. Hall's translation. ^ Morley's translation. 

/ 



42 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Most Important Survivals Anglo-Saxon Prosody 

guage formed after the migration to Britain, a fact which 
proves that the gleemen, as the language changed, were 
forced gradually to recast the old ballads in order to be 
understood. In later days all the heathen poetry was at 
the mercy of the Church. In her hands alone was the 
art preservative. The scops and gleemen became monks, 
and the few ancient ballads which they saw fit to copy 
they mutilated and amended at will. 

These fragments of primal poetry which have come 
without name or date out of the mists of the past may 
be counted almost on one's fingers. Aside from the 
single manuscript of Beowulf and Judith, now in the 
British Museum; the Junian Manuscript of Caedmon, 
now in the Bodleian ; the mutilated leaf of parchment 
rescued from an old bookbinding, telling of a fight around 
the burning castle of Finn, doubtless all that remains of 
a noble epic ; and two leaves of the poem Waldhere, ac- 
cidentally discovered at Copenhagen — they are all to be 
found in a single manuscript collection that by great good 
fortune has remained undisturbed in Exeter Cathedral 
for nearly nine centuries. This collection includes Wid- 
sith, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Lament of Deor^ 
The Fates of Men, The Ruined City. 

[For a full bibliography of the Anglo-Saxon literature 
up to the time of Alfred, see Brooke, p. xiv. ; also 
Earle, ch. ii. Excellent translations from most of these 
poems may be found in Brooke and Morley.] 

The Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. While early 
English poetry knew nothing of rhyme or meter it never- 
theless followed laws that were definite and difficult. Each 
verse must have four accents and must consist of two parts 
with three alliterating words, two of them in the first half. 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 43 

A Blood-stirring Meter Its Picturesqueness 

Oft Scyld Scefing sceathena J?reatum, 
Monegum maeg}>um meodo-setla ofteah. 

The effect of this arrangement is to give a curious, jerky- 
movement. One gets from it the idea of rude, nervous 
strength. It is poetry for the dealers of sword-strokes, 
for the rowers of war-galleys. The very monotony of the 
time-beat is exhilarating. One can almost hear the ex- 
cited cadences of the old gleeman; the steady, blood- 
stirring roll of his harp-notes; and see the rhythmic sway 
of his head and his body as one reads such lines as those 
describing the attack on the castle of Finn : 

Then wildly cried he, the warrior king, 
This is no dawn of East, no flight of dragon ; 
Nor burn the cressets, bright in the broad hall, 
Fierce is the flaming. Frightened the birds sing, 
Wild chirps the cricket, but wilder the war wood, 
Shield and shaft meeting. See the moon shining, 
In clouds she wanders, waking the woful deeds, 
Hates of the people. Rouse ye my heroes ! 
Fight for your dear land, fight in the forefront. 

Then in the hall rose roar of the slaughter, 
Round mighty Guthlafsson lay many corpses. 
Sailed then the raven, swart and brown-sallow ; 
In the fierce sword-gleam seemed it Finn's castle 
Blazed altogether. Battle I never heard, 
Nobler of heroes fitter for mead feast.* 

But usually this old poetry moves slowly. Repetitions 
and parallel constructions are frequent. The singer often 
hovers over his ideas, repeats his nouns in figurative 
synonyms, and dwells fondly on the added epithets thus 
made possible. Picturesque compounds and metaphors 

^ Washburn's translation. 



44 The Foundations of English Literature 

Its Beauty Northumbrian Literature 

are everywhere abundant. The ocean is the ** whale's 
path " ; blood is " sword-drink " ; the stag is the ** heath- 
stepper " ; and hail is ** the coldest of corn." When 
Beowulf rains sword-blows upon the mother of Grendel 
his ** war-blade sings a greedy battle-song." 

The great beauty of this early minstrelsy lies in its 
originality and freshness. It was the epic era of English 
song, and its pictures are drawn in the vague tints that 
are characteristic of childhood. Much of it is dreary and 
unpoetic, but through it are scattered rare gems : battle 
scenes, realistic and stirring; graphic pictures of the sea; 
swift glimpses into home and hall, and, what is better, 
into heart and soul. Here and there are passages that 
soar into the pure ether of world-poetry ; single lines that 
are whole poems in miniature. What a line is that in 
The Seafarer : 

He lives ever longing who looks to the sea. 

Feeble work does not survive the storms of a thousand 
years. 

Required Reading. The Seafarer, tr. Morley, ii. ; 
The Wanderer, tr. Morley, ii. ; The Ruined City, Brooke. 

II. The Northumbrian School (680-782) 

The introduction of Christianity, with its insistence 
upon the use of Latin as the literary tongue, well-nigh 
destroyed in the bud all native song. Ecclesiastical 
writings in abundance sprang up everywhere in the track 
of the Roman missionaries, but they were English neither 
in form nor spirit. The old songs that had come from 
the heart and the life of the people were regarded by the 
Church as heathen and impious, and gradually they dis- 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 45 

English Literature begins in Northumbria 

appeared. Only in Northumbria did the old literary 
spirit survive. Here the scop, when he became monk, 
remembered the old minstrelsy; he preserved with care 
the primal poetry that he loved, easing his new Christian 
conscience with pious editing. He created new songs 
from Biblical lore. Hell now took the place of Grendel's 
den ; devils roamed the dark places instead of nickers and 
fen-stalkers; his minstrel harp now glorified not the deeds 
of world-heroes, but the wars of the Lord. It was in 
Northumbria that English literature really began, and its 
opening notes were strong and varied. Beginning with 
Caedmon and ending with Cynewulf there was a well- 
rounded literary era which passed through every stage of 
development; which rose, flourished, and decayed, and 
which in its short life of a century showed a wonderful 
activity and fruitfulness. 

This sudden outburst of literature and culture in the 
rude north, among a people who a century before had 
been merely an invading horde of barbarians, seems at 
first thought paradoxical. A study of the era, however, 
reveals well defined causes, — the same, indeed, in the 
main, that have made every distinct literary period. 

Northumbria was the last important province of Eng- 
land to fall into Teutonic hands. Baeda records that it 
was settled by Angles who came with their families in a 
regular exodus, leaving the motherland well-nigh de- 
serted. From the very first they showed a marvelous 
activity. They swept away the native Britons, pushed 
their frontiers to the Humber, the Frith of Forth, and 
the Irish Sea, and then under ^thelfrith, scarce fifty 
years from their first settlement, they made themselves 
masters of all the southern kingdoms save Kent. The 



46 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Glory of the North Influence of Christianity 

seventh century in England was the era of Northumbria. 
Under Eadwine and the three strong kings that followed 
him, the glory of the north, though at times temporarily 
dimmed, illumined all of Britain, and even shed its rays 
across the Channel. As a result of this temporal pros- 
perity, this period of national expansion, of pride and 
confidence in fatherland, there came an enlargement of 
ideas and a new intellectual activity. Nor did the move- 
ment cease when Northumbria lost her political leader- 
ship, for the years of peace and material prosperity that 
follow this loss mark the time of her greatest intellectual 
glory. 

It was at this fortunate moment, this period of rapid 
transition, that Christianity entered the north. From 
the first the Angles had done nothing by halves, and 
now, having accepted the new religion, they followed it 
with zeal and vigor. There arose a wonderful band of 
spiritual leaders, — afterwards to be revered as saints. 
The freshness and power of the Church was like that of 
apostolic times. Monasteries arose on every hand. En- 
thusiastic workers like Aldhelm and Biscop and Wilfrid 
visited Rome again and again to bring books, pictures, 
and vestments, skilled workers, artisans, and chanters. 
Eager Northumbrian learners went to Canterbury to sit 
at the feet of Theodore and the learned Hadrian. Grad- 
ually there grew up in the north a remarkable band of 
scholars, until, in the eighth century, the best learning 
of Europe was to be found in the Northumbrian monas- 
teries. When Charlemagne, the central figure of the 
Middle Ages, looked over Europe for a scholar worthy 
to instruct his sons and his people, he chose Alcuin of 
York. 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 47 

A Tolerant Priesthood A Spontaneous Outburst of Poetry 

The Church being thus powerful in the north, why did 
it not cast a blight on all literary products in the native 
tongue, as it had done elsewhere in England ? The 
reasons can only be conjectured. The Church of North- 
umbria had been founded by the Irish ; the Celtic ritual 
was in the vernacular, and it was a whole generation be- 
fore it was supplanted by the Roman form. The clergy 
therefore were less prejudiced against the native tongue. 
They taught the people freely in the only language they 
could understand. Even Bseda, that quintessence of 
monasticism, spent his last hours turning the Gospel into 
English for the use of the people, and the learned monks 
of Whitby translated with pious care that an illiterate 
peasant might turn the Scriptures into native verse. 
Then, too, the Angles had come to England without 
breaking their home life, and old songs and traditions 
linger longest about the fireside. They had remained in 
the old home on the North Sea a century longer than 
had the men of Kent. They were nearer to their child- 
hood and the epic era. The old minstrel harp, ringing 
with heathen songs of heroes and booty, enlivened the 
long evenings, and it was permitted even under the 
shadow of the monastery. The old songs still had their 
primal vigor and freshness. They were still a part of 
the individual and the national life. The Church could 
change the theme, but it was powerless to change the 
spirit and the form. Then, too, the new school of poetry 
in Northumbria was spontaneous even as it was in later 
Elizabethan times, and when the song bursts from the 
heart the singer must voice it in his own tongue. And 
who can tell that it was not Caedmon, the unlettered 
herdsman, — who sang because he must, and, like Shake- 



48 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Poet Caedmon Bosda's Account 

speare and Burns of later years, used his native tongue 
because he knew no other, — who gave the primal impulse 
to Northumbrian song ? *' Others after him," writes 
Baeda, ** attempted in the English nation to compose 
religious poems, but none could ever compare with him, 
for he did not learn the art of poetry from men, but from 
God." 

/. Ccedmon (d. 680 ? ) 

" The Anglo-Saxon Milton." 

Life, (Baeda, Ecclesiastical History , Bk. iv., Ch. xxiv.) 
The early English minstrelsy is anonymous. Amid all 
the wreckage of the settlement era we find not the name 
of a single poet until in a chapter of Baeda we find, in- 
serted half by accident, an account of the poet Caedmon 
(pr. Kadmon). Other singers of greater power there may 
have been in Baeda's day; it is not impossible that even 
the glorious old shaper of Beowulf or of The Fight at 
Finnesbruh was known to him, but he mentioned only 
this one singer since the motive of his work was wholly 
religious, and since he lost no opportunity for recording 
events that he believed to be miraculous. Of Caedmon 
we know nothing save what is contained in this single 
chapter. Of his poetry we cannot say with certainty that 
we have a single line. 

Having lived [says Baeda] in a secular habit till he was well advanced in 
years, he had never learned anything of versifying ; for which reason, being 
sometimes at entertainments, when it was agreed for the sake of mirth that 
all present should sing in their turns, when he saw the instrument coming 
towards him, he rose up from table and returned home. Having done 
so at a certain time and gone out of the house where the entertainment was 
to the stable, where he had to take care of the horses that night, he there 
composed himself to rest at the proper time ; a person appeared to him in 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 49 



Caedmon's Miraculous Gift His Songs 

his sleep and saluting him by his name said, " Caedmon, sing some song 
to me." He answered, " I cannot sing ; for that was the reason why I left 
the entertainment, and retired to this place, because I could not sing." The 
other who talked to him replied, "However, you shall sing." "What 
shall I sing?" rejoined he. " Sing the beginning of created things," said 
the other. Hereupon he presently began to sing verses to the praise of 
God, which he had never heard, the purport whereof was thus : 

"We are now to praise the Maker of the Heavenly Kingdom, the power 
of the Creator and His counsel, the deeds of the Father of Glory. How 
He, being the Eternal God, became the author of all miracles, who first, as 
almighty preserver of the human race, created Heaven for the sons of men 
as the roof of the house, and next the earth." 

This is the sense and not the words in order as he sung them in his sleep ; 
for verses, though never so well composed, cannot be literally translated out 
of one language into another without losing much of their beauty and lofti- 
ness. Awaking from his sleep, he remembered all that he had sung in his 
dream, and soon added much more to the same effect in verse worthy of the 
Deity. 

Believing this to be a veritable miracle, the heads of the 
monastery at once admitted Caedmon as a monk, and 
here he passed the rest of his life. Portions of Scripture 
were translated to him daily, and he, 

keeping in mind all he heard, and, as it were, chewing the cud, converted 
the same into most harmonious verse ; and sweetly repeating the same, made 
his masters in their turn his hearers. He sang the creation of the world, 
the origin of man, and all the history of Genesis ; and made many verses 
on the departure of the children of Israel out of Egypt, and their entering 
into the land of promise, with many other histories from holy writ ; the in- 
carnation, passion, resurrection of our Lord, and His ascension into Heaven ; 
the coming of the Holy Ghost and the preaching of the Apostles ; also the 
terror of future judgment^ the horror of the pains of Hell, and the delights 
of Heaven ; besides many more about the divine benefits and judgments. 

Here, then, is the border-land between the old and the 
new. Caedmon's childhood was over before the conver- 
sion of Northumbria. By instinct and early training he 
was as heathen as were his wild ancestors whose ships 



50 The Foundations of English Literature 



A Christianized Scop The Junian Manuscript 

had spread terror along the Saxon shore. Christianity- 
had come to him in early manhood ; it had changed the 
names of his gods and had added to his stores of religious 
lore. We may be sure that had we the veritable words 
which Caedmon sang from Genesis and Exodus that stirred 
those English monks of Whitby, we should find them 
Hebraic and Christian only in externals. In conception, 
in spirit, in scene, they would be as Teutonic as Beowulf, 
and almost as heathen. 

The CcBdmon Cycle. (Brooke, Chs. xv.-xx. ; Azarius, 

Development of Old English Thought.) In the year 1650 

or thereabout there came into the hands 

The Junian Manu- , , -r^ , i i t • 11 

script. of the Dutch scholar Junius an old 

BOOK I. Anglo-Saxon manuscript in two parts, 

Genesis (2935 lines), the first Containing paraphrases from the 

Exodus (589 lines). Qj^ Tcstamcnt and the second a short 

Daniel (765 lines). 

BOOK II collection of NewTestament paraphrases, 

Christ and Satin (733 ^hich have been grouped under the title 

lines) : Christ and Satan. The opening lines of 

Ha"rol[ng ^fTen! Genesis suggested Baeda's Latin para- 

The Resurrection, phrase of Csedmon's first song, and the 

The Ascension. , . r .^ • ^ j j 

Pentecost. contcnts of the manuscript corresponded 

The Last Judgment, go fully with Bseda's description of the 

The Temptation. , 1 , 1 n • 

poet s work that the collection was at 
once attributed to Caedmon. Modern criticism, how- 
ever, has made sad work with this estimate. It now 
seems certain that the collection embraces the work of 
several singers, and it may even be doubted if Caedmon 
wrote any part of the book. Portions of Genesis and 
ExoduSy however, are certainly worthy of this inspired 
singer, and in the absence of positive knowledge it will 
do no harm to consider all of the poems under his name. 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 51 

Literary Merit of the Cycle The Old Heathen Spirit 

That they were done by members of the Northumbrian 
school within a century following the death of Caedmon 
seems reasonably certain. 

The literary merit of this song cycle varies greatly. 
When the paraphrase follows closely the Scripture narra- 
tive or when it becomes homiletic, it is usually dull and 
lifeless. The Daniel and the Christ and Satan may be 
dismissed without comment. But there are thrilling 
passages in Exodus, and parts of Genesis mark the highest 
sweep of Anglo-Saxon song. The poet leaves at times 
the Scripture narrative, and is never so delightful as when 
he has wandered farthest and has given his imagination 
free rein. At every point where there is action he enters 
with heart and soul into the scene. It lives again ; it 
seems almost reenacting before his eyes. The episode 
of the flood, the battles of Abraham, the destruction of 
the cities of the plain, are told with all the enthusiasm 
of an eye-witness. There is a mental picture before the 
singer, clean-cut, vivid, and its background is ever some 
familiar scene of his native Northland. The offering of 
Isaac takes place on a high dune overlooking the low- 
lands. The preparations for the burning are thoroughly 
Teutonic ; it reminds one of the closing scene of Beowulf. 
All battle songs have the old heathen ring ; blood flows 
in rivers; even when the sea swallows the Egyptians 
blood is everywhere. It is not the monk but the heathen 
scop who sings the approach of Pharaoh's host: 

A spear-wood was moving, the war-line gleamed, 
Flags wildly flapped, folk the march treading : 
Fierce clattered trappings, war was approaching, 
Blickered the broadswords, blared the brass trumpets. 
War-fowls were wheeling, wailing above them, 
Greedy for carnage ; ravens were croaking, 



52 The Foundations of English Literature 

Destruction of the Egyptians Caedmon's Genesis 

Dewy-winged spoilers over slain bodies, 
Swart battle-seekers. Wolves were singing 
Horrible even-song, hopeful of having. 

The blood leaps in the veins of the singer as he tells of 
the final catastrophe. The fierce harp-roll of the Finnes- 
bruh fragment resounds from the verse. The singer is 
tense with excitement. Like one who has just emerged 
from a great battle he can think and talk of nothing else. 
He repeats himself again and again ; he uses every epithet, 
every image of battle and carnage known to the Teutonic 
mind : 

The folk was affrighted, flood-terror seized on 
Souls deeply saddened ; sea threatened death then, 
Red were the burg-slopes, blood did bedew them ; 
Gore gushed from ocean, corpse rode the billow, 
Water was weapon-full, wail-mist started. 
Back the Egyptians turned wildly rushing, 
Tore mad with terror, torment pursued them ; 
Home now they longed for, battle-sick heroes, 
Boast became v\^eeping ; began then with fury 
Boiling of billows ; of all that war-band 
None saw his dear home, for fast behind them 
Weird locked the wave-doors. Where erst the way was 
Mere galloped madly, the host was o'erwhelmed, — 

and so through eighty quivering lines. Such songs 
would have pleased heathen revelers on the mead-benches 
who had just listened to the thrilling roll of Beowulf. 

But the glory of the Junian Manuscript is the story of 
the revolt of Satan and the fall of man in Genesis. It is 
Paradise Lost nine centuries before Milton. As we know 
surely of no earlier work from which Coedmon could have 
gained his materials, it is pleasing to fancy that this poet, 
divinely inspired, created with sublime imagination the 
story that was afterwards to appear as the greatest of 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 53 



Similarity to Paradise Lost Soliloquy of Satan 

English epics. For Milton was deeply interested in 
things Anglo-Saxon, — he had written a history of the 
period; he was doubtless a friend of Junius, and the 
Junian Manuscript was first printed in 1655, seven years 
before Paradise Lost. The two epics coincide in many 
points. The theme of both is the same: after the expul- 
sion from heaven of the rebel angels, God creates man to 
fill the seats thus left vacant, and Satan ruins him for 
revenge. The conception of Satan and of Hell, so widely 
different from that of Dante and the Middle Ages, is the 
same with both poets. How Miltonic is the description 
of the fall of the angels as told by the elder poet: 

Then was the mighty wroth, Heaven's highest Lord 
Cast him from his high seat, for he had brought 
His master's hate on him. His favor lost, 
The Good was angered against him, and he 
Must therefore seek the depths of Hell's fierce pains, 
Because he strove against Heaven's highest Lord, 
Who shook him from His favor, cast him down 
To the deep dales of Hell, where he became 
Devil. The fiend with all his comrades fell 
From Heaven, Angels, for three nights and days, 
From Heaven to Hell.' 

And how natural to us is this picture of Satan bound 
in the fiery pit and soliloquizing on his fallen estate: 

Most unlike this narrow place 
To that which once we knew, high in Heaven's realm. 

Woe ! Woe ! had I the power of my hands, 
And for a season, for one winter's space, 
Might be without ; then, with this host I — 
But iron binds me round ; this coil of chains 

' Morley's translation. 



54 The Foundations of English Literature 

Terse and Vivid Passages A Teutonic Poem 

Rides me ; I rule no more ; close bonds of Hell 
Hem me their prisoner. Above, below, 
Here is vast fire, and never have I seen 
More loathly landscape ; never fade the flames. 

May we then not plan vengeance, pay Him back 

With any hurt, since shorn by Him of light? 

Now He has set the bounds of a mid-earth 

Where after His own image He has wrought 

Man, by whom He will people once again 

Heaven's kingdom with pure souls. Therefore, intent 

Must be our thought that, if we ever may. 

On Adam and his offspring we may wreak 

Revenge, and, if we can devise a way, 

Pervert His will.^ 

There are passages in Csedmon as terse, condensed, 
vivid, as any in Milton, for instance, the description of 
Hell, the land 

That was lere of light and that was full of flame, 
Fire's horror huge ; 

or where the fiend took wing and 

Smote the flame in two with fiendish craft. 

The conception of the poem is thoroughly Teutonic. 
The deep Northern gloom and pathos pervade it. Satan 
is a powerful folk-lord seeking revenge. Bound and 
riveted down beyond all hope of escape he calls to his 
war-band: " Stand by me, comrades, now. If ever in 
former days I gave you cause for joy, 't is now you can 
repay." But there is no need for appeal; his ** shoulder- 
companions " are true Teutons, who will die ere they 
leave their chief in distress. It is this element in Caed- 
mon's work that explains its similarity to Milton's. The 

^ Morley's translation. 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 55 

Persistence of Teutonic Traits The Father of English Poetry 

two poems coincide in conception, and to some degree 
even in detail, yet this does not of necessity make Para- 
dise Lost an imitation. It simply shows how marked and 
persistent has been the English personality, for it is safe 
to say with Taine that ** Milton's Satan exists already 
in Caedmon's as the picture exists in the sketch because 
both have their model in the race." 

The figure of Caedmon in English literature, despite 
uncertainty and conjecture, is vast and impressive: 

He was one of those gifted men [says Guest] who have stamped deeply 
and lastingly upon the literature of their country the impress of their own 
minds and feelings. He was the first Englishman — it may be the first in- 
dividual of Gothic race — who exchanged the gorgeous images of the old 
mythology for the chaster beauties of Christian poetry. From the sixth to 
the twelfth century he appears to have been the great model whom all 
imitated and few could equal. For upward of five centuries he was the 
father of English poetry ; and when his body was discovered in the reign of 
our first Henry it seems to have excited no less reverence than those of the 
kings and saints by which it was surrounded. — History of English Rhythms. 

Required Reading. The translation from Genesis in 
Morley, ii., 81. 

2. BcBda (6j3-y35) 

The father of English learning. — Burke, 

Life. (Autobiographical sketch and letter of Cuthbert 
at the end of the Ecclesiastical History^ Bohn ed. ; 
Browne, The Venerable Bede.) 

To turn from Caedmon to Baeda is like leaving a Saxon 
mead-hall to enter the solemn aisles of a cathedral. In 
one we have wild song in a barbaric tongue, full of energy 
and rude beauty; in the other graceful periods in the 
polished language of a foreign civilization. Baeda more 



56 The Foundations of English Literature 

Poverty of the Vernacular Latin the Literary Language 

than Csedmon is the representative Hterary figure of the 
Northumbrian era. We may be sure that had this illus- 
trious scholar added a chapter to his church history on 
the literary development of his native province, he would 
have passed rapidly over all writings in the vernacular. 
However necessary they may have been considered to 
the education and spiritual development of the common 
people, writings in the native tongue could have had 
little literary weight when compared with productions in 
the Latin. For the English was a barbarous tongue : it 
was extremely limited in its vocabulary; it could not 
make nice discriminations; it was weak in conjunctions; 
it confounded nouns with adjectives and even adverbs; 
it was guttural and harsh ; it had no standards of good 
usage, no written literature. The Latin, on the contrary, 
was one of the most flexible and polished instruments 
ever made by man. The EngUsh was changing rapidly, 
the Latin was fixed and permanent. Little wonder it is 
that those who desired literary finish and literary per- 
manence turned to the Latin. As late as the Elizabethan 
Age, Bacon wrote his Novum Organmn in Latin since he 
dared not trust that great work to the vernacular. The 
wonder is that anything during the early era was wTitten 
in the native tongue. 

We cannot, therefore, simply because from a stand- 
point twelve centuries away we see the great signifi- 
cance of the use of this early English, refuse to consider, 
as many have done, the Latin writings of the era. They 
played their part, and a leading one it was, in the develop- 
ment of Enghsh civilization and English literature. To 
neglect this element is to get a partial and distorted view 
of the beginnings. We need not consider all of the 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 57 

The Life of Bseda His Industry 

monastic writers. We may take Bseda as the type and 
consider him alone. 

Few lives, even of scholars, have been more bare of 
incident than his. From early childhood, when he was 
left an orphan, until his death, he dwelt in the monastery 
at Jarrow, working day after day his long life through 
without an idle hour or a needless pause. *' While at- 
tentive to the rule of my order," he writes, ** and the 
service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learn- 
ing or teaching or writing." Thus without incident or 
break he passed his life. The fiery zeal of Wilfrid and 
Biscop displayed itself in action. It was for them to rule 
synods, build monasteries, and ransack Christendom for 
ecclesiastical stores. ^ Bseda's zeal was no less earnest, 
but it turned into quieter channels. The costly books 
that Wilfrid collected with such energy were a miscellane- 
ous heap until Baeda arranged them and digested them. 
With magnificent courage he plunged into this wilderness 
of tomes, nor did he cease his labors until from their 
pages he had reconstructed the temple of human knowl- 
edge. The range of his themes is surprising: he was a 
tireless biblical commentator; he made an encyclopedia 
of all that the Church Fathers had said about the Scrip- 
tures; he was a scientist six centuries before Roger Bacon, 
and he even left his books to study nature at first-hand ; 
he wrote treatises on mathematics, grammar, rhetoric, 
music, philosophy, language, and many other subjects. 
The forty-five books of his composition form an encyclo- 
pedia of the learning of his age. And all this he did in 
the spare hours left after Church duties and after giving 
daily instruction to a school of six hundred monks. 

But the work that most endears him to the modern 



58 The Foundations of English Literature 

His History of England Its Great Value 

world is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, 
which he completed three years before his death. His 
motive, as the title indicates, was to trace the religious 
development of Britain; but so closely were Church and 
State connected that he found it necessary to give the 
secular history as well. The work is therefore a complete 
history of England from the earliest times until 731, but 
the valuable portion is that following the year 597, all 
that precedes being derived from Gildas, Orosius, and the 
Life of St. Germanus. In his historical methods Baeda 
was singularly modern. He had the papal archives at 
Rome searched for original documents, and he spared no 
pains in collecting materials from eye-witnesses and con- 
temporaries. As a result we can rely implicitly on any 
statement that Baeda declares to be true, a fact of the 
utmost importance when we remember that, in the words 
of Green, ** all that we really know of the century and a 
half that follows the landing of Augustine we know from 
him." The book is permeated with the monastic spirit. 
Its author delights in recording what he believes to have 
been miracles ; he draws spiritual lessons from everything ; 
and he is constantly detecting curious symbolisms and 
analogies. All this, instead of detracting from the value 
of the book, makes it the more dehghtful. The line be- 
tween fact and miracle is sharply drawn. Often in his 
stories of saints who have seen angels or heard miracu- 
lous voices or received divine recovery from disease, we 
catch charming glimpses into the life of the times and the 
spirit of the age. Even aside from its historical value 
the book is charming reading, as interesting in parts as a 
novel, and the gentle piety and sweetness that breathe 
from its pages make it holy reading even to-day. Brooke 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 59 



Cuthbert's Narrative of Baeda's Last Hours 

declares that there is in the writings of the whole monastic 
school of the era *' a religious tenderness, a fuller love 
of quiet beauty, an imaginative heavenliness, which our 
sacred poetry has never lost." 

The story of Baeda's last hours as related by his pupil 
Cuthbert has often been told : 

During these days he labored to compose two works well worthy to be 
remembered, besides the lessons we had from him, and singing of psalms : 
viz., he translated the Gospel of St. John . . . into our own tongue 
for the benefit of the Church, and some collections out of the Book of Notes 
of Bishop Isidorus. . . . On Wednesday he ordered us to write with 
all speed what he had begun ; and this done, we walked till the third hour 
with the relics of saints, according to the custom of that day. There was 
one of us with him who said, to him, " Most dear master, there is still one 
chapter wanting." . . . He answered, "Take your pen and make 
ready and write fast," which he did. . . . He passed the day joyfully 
till evening, and the boy above mentioned, said, ' ' Dear master, there is yet 
one sentence not written." He answered, " Write quickly." Soon after 
the boy said, " The sentence is now written." He replied, "It is well ; 
you have said the truth. It is ended." . . . And on the pavement of 
his little cell, singing " Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the 
Holy Ghost," when he had named the Holy Ghost he breathed his last and 
so departed to the heavenly kingdom. 

Required Reading. Cuthbert's Letter, Morley, ii., 
153. 



CHAPTER VI 

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

The Northumbrian School (680-782) — Continued. 

J. Cy new II If 

The most many-sided, prolific, and, we might say, greatest poet of his 
time, — Tefz Brink. 

Life. (Brooke, Chs. xxiii.-xxiv. ; Morley, ii., Ch. ix. ; 
Azarius, Development of Old English Thought ; Earle, 
Ch. xi. ; Ten Brink, i., p. 48.) 

Until comparatively recent times the Caedmon men- 
tioned in Baeda's history stood solitary as the only 
Anglo-Saxon poet whose name we knew. In the year 
1840, however, while editing the old poem Eleite, Kemble 
discovered that several words in the epilogue were runes, 
and that they spelled out the word CYNEWULF. Since 
then three other Anglo-Saxon poems, Juliana, Christ, 
and Fates of the Apostles, have been found to be signed 
in the same way, and the conclusion that the four are 
the work of one poet by the name of Cynewulf has been 
generally accepted. 

Of the identity and biography of this newly discovered 
singer we know nothing. Of his personality, however, 
we can tell considerable, for the work that he has left us 
abounds in personal allusions. All of his poems are re- 
ligious, and their materials are drawn mostly from Bible 
homilies and Church legends. The Juliana is the story 
of a Christian maiden who submitted heroically to torture 

60 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 6i 



Cynewulf's Christ His Elene 

and even to martyrdom rather than take as a husband one 
not a Christian. This and The Fates of the Apostles need 
not detain us. While they contain passages of undoubted 
power, both poems are far below the rest of Cynewulf's 
work. His true strength is shown in his Christ and his 
Elene, both of which he entered upon with his whole 
soul. 

The Christ is a trilogy treating successively of the 
Nativity, the Ascension, and the Day of Judgment. 
Scattered through it are passionate lyrics, prayers, hymns, 
bursts of praise and joy. Parts are dramatic, suggesting 
the miracle plays of later years ; everywhere there is lofti- 
ness of thought and sustained power. 

In the Elene Cynewulf treats the old legend of Con- 
stantine's vision of the cross; the expedition of his 
mother Helena ( Elene is the Greek form) to Jerusalem ; 
the finding of the cross and the nails, and the conversion 
of the Jew Cyriarcus. Like all of Cynewulf's work, the 
poem is deficient in plot and in constructive art : the 
finding of the cross is the climax, and yet after this 
episode the narrative drags on and on for many pages. 
The characters are mere puppets, and the movement of 
the narrative is often retarded by tiresome repetitions. 
But despite all these faults, there is unmistakable dra- 
matic power about the poem. With little trouble it 
could be turned into a miracle play, each of the chapters 
furnishing a scene. Parts of it are powerfully conceived, 
and it is hard to escape from the conviction that the 
whole poem was written in heat, that it was poured from 
a full heart. We know from the epilogue that it was 
composed during a time of spiritual crisis. Old age v/as 
upon the poet ; he was 



62 The Foundations of English Literature 

Autobiography in Elene Its Art 

stained with crimes, 
Fettered with sins, pained with sorrows, 
Bitterly bound, banefully vexed. ^ 

He sought aid from books; late into the night he labored 
with them, and at last Heaven revealed to him a vision 
of the '* tree of glory " as the emblem of victory. The 
legend of Elene, then, was typical of his own experience, 
and the poem burst from the full heart of the singer. 
Judas is none other than Cynewulf himself, and his pas- 
sionate prayer for guidance came from the depths of the 
poet's soul. 

The art of the poem lies in its artlessness. It has not 
a trace of self-consciousness, of effort, of constraint. The 
poet again and again allows the wild heathen fire in his 
blood to blaze up unchecked. When Helena, for in- 
stance, set out on her journey to find oversea the true 
cross, we find him picturing a scene that had happened 
many a time along the Viking coast when fleets of black 
war-ships were making ready to harry the Saxon shore : 

The steeds of the sea 
Round the shore of the ocean were standing, 
Cabled sea-horses, at rest on the water. 

Then severally hastened 
Over the mark-paths, band after band. 
Then they loaded with battle-sarks. 
With shields and spears, with mail-clad warriors, 
With men and women, the steeds of the sea. . . . 
Then they let o'er the billows the foamy ones go, 
The high wave-rushers. The hull oft received 
O'er the mingling of waters the blows of the waves. 
There might he see who that voyage beheld . , , 
Burst o'er the pathway the sea- wood, hasten 
Neath swelling sails, the sea-horse play.^ 

' Garnett's translation. ^ Garnett's translation. 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 63 

Cynewulf and Caedmon Cynewulf's Minor Strain 

Cynewulf is a stronger singer than Caedmon, than any 
early English poet save the creator of Beowulf. In 
Caedmon we had lofty flights, some of them the highest 
efforts of the Anglo-Saxon muse; in Cynewulf we have 
sustained power. Caedmon, kept close to the Scripture 
text ; Cynewulf constantly wanders far from authorities, 
and, like Chaucer, tells the tale anew so that it becomes 
his own. Caedmon, while deeply religious, and devout 
even to asceticism, belonged, after all, to the first genera- 
tion of Christians ; with Cynewulf Christianity had pene- 
trated deeper; it was a part of his birthright, and not 
often does his heathen blood rise to his eyes and brain 
and make him to forget. Caedmon's songs are all in the 
major key, full of hope and joy; Cynewulf sang a minor 
song, his was a sad soul, — doubtless he lived in the melan- 
choly days of his country's decline. 

Such was Cynewulf, a true poet with a soul as sensitive 
as gossamer. In youth, as such natures often will, he 
had plunged into the mire of worldly life ; he had seen 
much, he had suffered much. In old age we find him 
sad and serious, oppressed by the hollowness of life. His 
cry comes to us strangely like that of Hrothgar in Beo- 
wulfy strangely like that of Macbeth in Shakespeare. 
How thoroughly English, how familiar is his lament : 

To each one is wealth 
Fleeting 'neath heaven, treasures of earth 
Pass 'neath the clouds lilcest to wind, 
When before men it mounts up aloud. 
Roars round the clouds, raging rushes, 
And then all at once silent becomes, 
In- narrow prison closely confined, 
Strongly repressed. So passes this world.* 

^ Garnett's translation. 



64 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Seeds of Puritanism Poems Assigned to Cynewulf 

Cynewulf is a long step av/ay from Caedmon toward 
the typical churchman of the Middle Ages : . introspective, 
dreamy, mystic, dwelling on thoughts of the emblems of 
Christianity until he sees visions, musing on his unwor- 
thiness and sin until he despises the life that is and lives 
only in the life to be. He is but the logical result of the 
combination of Christianity with the Teutonic nature. 
He shows that the seeds of Puritanism were already 
planted ten centuries before Cromwell and Milton. 

Required Reading. Garnett's translation of Elene, 
For text see Kent's edition of Elene, Library of Anglo- 
Saxon Poetry, vol. vi., and Cook's Cynewulf s Christ. 

The Cynewulfian Cycle. He must needs have a steady 
hand who .would steer safely through the reefs of Cyne- 
wulfian criticism. The temptation to leave the known 
path and to wander into romantic conjecture is. well-nigh 
overpowering. Critics of the highest authority have at dif- 
ferent times attributed to Cynewulf almost every known 
piece of Anglo-Saxon literature, including Beowulf and 
the primal poetry. Full biographies of the poet have 
been constructed by drawing from this and that poem of 
which he may have been the author. Such summaries, 
however, in view of our present knowledge of Cynewulf, 
must be viewed with caution ; at best they are only 
expressions of opinion. 

In the Exeter and Vercelli books the poems Guthlac, 
Descent into Hell, Riddles, The Phcenix, The Visio7z of 
the Rood, and Andreas resemble closely in tone and style 
the signed work of Cynewulf, and have, therefore, almost 
by common consent been regarded as the work of this 
singer. The evidence is wholly internal. For instance, 
in the Vision of the Rood the poet declares that 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 65 

The Riddles, Gut Mac Andreas 

Spotted with sins, 
Wounded sorely with vices, the glorious Tree 
As it blissfully shone, I saw worthily robed, 
And with gold all adorned, nobly covered with gems.^ 

The tree speaks to him, recounts its pathetic story, and 
begs him to tell the vision among men. From that mo- 
ment a change came to his life. 

I have known 
In all my hours many an hour of longing ; 
Now my life's comfort is that I may seek 
The Tree of Victory, 
Now for defense I look but to the Cross. 
I have not many precious friends on earth. 
From the world's joys they have gone hence to seek 
The King of Glory. I now day by day 
Expect the time when the Lord's Cross, that here 
On earth I once beheld, shall take me forth 
From this weak life and bring me where is joy.^ 

No one can fail to note the close similarity to Elene. 

The Riddles, of which there are ninety-three in all, have 
been attributed to Cynewulf since, according to Leo and 
other eminent scholars, the first of the series contains 
the poet's name in acrostic. If they are indeed Cyne- 
wulf's, they must have been written early in life during 
his career as a wandering scop, and they thus furnish 
considerable material for a biography of his early years. 
Of the other poems ascribed to Cynewulf, Guthlac, The 
Phoenix, 2^x6, Andreas alone need be mentioned. Guthlac, 
like Juliana, records the life and death of a saint. At 
first it drags painfully, but at length its manner suddenly 
changes, and its ending is worthy of Cynewulf when at 
his best. The Ph(£nix is an allegory. In the fabled bird 

^ Morley's translation. ^ Morley's translation. 

5 



66 The Foundations of English Literature 

Probably Influenced by Cynewulf The Saga of yudith 

that Hved for a thousand years, then flew to the desert 
where it was consumed by the heat only to rise re-created 
from its own ashes, the poet saw typified the life and res- 
urrection of Christ. The Andreas is a masterpiece fully 
equal in power of conception and vigor of treatment to the 
Elene and the Christ. It is an account of the legendary 
adventures of St. Andrew who voyaged to Mirmedonia 
to rescue St. Matthew. The poet who wrote it was a 
passionate lover of the sea; the salt breezes of the great 
ocean surge through it as they do through no other 
Anglo-Saxon poem. It is strongly conceived and vigor- 
ously executed. It differs from the known work of 
Cynewulf in that its plot and mechanical construction 
are carefully handled. It strikes the true epic note; 
parts of it suggest Beowulf. 

In all these poems, save perhaps the Andreas^ we have 
the Cynewulfian subjectivity, the minor strain, the de- 
fects in constructive art. If they belong to Cynewulf, 
they modify in no respect our previous estimate of the 
poet formed from a study of the four signed poems. 
They enlarge the picture and add details, but they bring 
no discordant elements. If they are not Cynewulf's, we 
can say with conservatism that they were influenced by 
the work of this singer; that they were done, perhaps, by 
disciples who followed carefully in the footprints of their 
master. 

[For the text of Andreas, see Baskervill's edition. Li- 
brary of Anglo-Saxon Poetry , vol. iii.] 

Judith. In the same manuscript with Beowulf there is 
the fragment of an old heroic saga which, all things con- 
sidered, is the most remarkable production that we have 
thus far seen. Only three of the original twelve cantos 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 67 

The Theme of Judith Its Dramatic Energy 

remain, but by great good fortune these preserve the cli- 
max and the end of the poem. The author of Judith and 
the date of its composition are unknown. Concerning 
few things have Anglo-Saxon scholars differed so widely ; 
almost every date from 680 to the tenth century has been 
assigned to it. Some have confidently claimed it as 
Csedmon's, others have attributed it to Cynewulf, and 
still others to a writer of the Cynewulfian school. Pro- 
fessor Cook propounds the rather plausible theory that 
" the poem Judith was composed in or about the year 
856 in gratitude for the deliverance of Wessex from the 
fury of the heathen Northmen, and dedicated to the 
adopted daughter of England, the pride, the hope, 
the darling of the nation." In the face of such diversity 
of opinion, it is safe to say that we know nothing sure 
about the author or the era of the poem. 

The theme of Judith is taken from the Apocrypha. 
The Assyrian host under Holofernes is laying siege to the 
Hebrew city, and on the eve of triumph the great leader 
gives a magnificent banquet to his lords. At its close, 
drunken to the verge of helplessness, he orders the 
Hebrew maiden Judith to be brought into his tent, and 
then falls into a drunken stupor. Judith has her enemy 
within her power; she hews off his head and steals forth 
with the ghastly trophy into the Hebrew camp. The 
poem closes with the reception of the heroine by her 
countrymen, the attack upon the enemy at daybreak, and 
the complete rout of the Assyrians. 

Mutilated as it is, this poem is one of the finest in the whole range of 
Anglo-Saxon literature. The language is of the most polished and brilliant 
character ; the meter harmonious, and varied with admirable skill. The 
action is dramatic and energetic, culminating impressively in the catastrophe 



68 The Foundations of English Literature 

The School at York Alcuin 

of Holof ernes' death ; but there is none of that pathos which gives Beowulf 
so much of its power. The whole poem breathes only of triumph and war- 
like enthusiasm. In constructive skill and perfect command of his foreign 
subject the unknown author of Judith surpasses both Caedmon and Cyne- 
wulf, while he is certainly not inferior to either of them in command of 
language and meter. — Sweet. 

Required Reading. Cook's or Garnett's translation. 
The best edition of the text is Cook's. 

/J., The Scholars of York 

(Brooke, Ch. xxvi. ; West, Life of Alcuin,) In 
Baeda's day the literary capitol of Northumbria and of 
England had been the monastery of Jarrow, but no sooner 
had the great scholar died than the leadership passed to 
York. Here were collected the riches of Northumbrian 
learning and literature ; here under Archbishops Ecgberht 
and ^thelberht was established what was in everything 
except name the first English university. Its library was 
the best in Europe outside of Rome; its corps of instruc- 
tors included the ablest scholars of their age ; its curric- 
ulum covered every realm of knowledge. It produced 
an abundance of Latin works, and it copied out and 
preserved the vanishing songs of the native singers. 
The books that afterwards were to be translated into 
the dialect of Wessex by Alfred and his school came 
without a doubt from the great literary center of 
York. 

The brightest alumnus of this school was Alcuin, who 
from infancy until middle age resided in its cloisters. It 
was at its highest point of prosperity in 782 ; but in this 
year, owing to the death of ^thelfrith and the departure 
of Alcuin, its decline began. The great scholar left none 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 69 

He Rescues English Learning Literary Unproductiveness of Mercia 

too soon. In less than ten years the Danes had made 
their first descent upon the northern coasts. Soon they 
had overrun all Northumbria and had fallen with ferocity 
upon the monasteries. It devolved upon Alcuin to bear 
the precious shoots of English learning across the Chan- 
nel and to transplant them into continental soil, thus 
saving them from utter destruction. '* It belongs," says 
Brooke, ** to the glory of England to say that it was an 
English scholar of York who exactly at the right time 
bore off to the continent the whole of English learning, 
and out of English learning built up a new world." 

III. The Era of Wessex (871-1016) 

The Middle Period, y8o-8ji. The kingdom of Mercia, 
whose rising power humbled Northumbria and whose 
brilliancy filled the eighth century in England, need not 
detain us, since it produced nothing of literary value. 
Despite defeat and humiliation, the north still continued 
to be the center of Anglo-Saxon letters; the school of 
York was never more brilliant than during the reign of 
Offa, under whom Mercia reached its highest point. But 
both the political power of the Midlands and the intel- 
lectual supremacy of the north were destined to a speedy 
fall. The ninth century with its Danes was another era 
of darkness. Its horror and uncertainty can hardly be 
imagined. " Throughout the whole of the ninth cen- 
tury," says Allen, " and the early part of the tenth the 
whole history of England is the history of a perpetual 
pillage. No man who sowed could tell whether he might 
reap or not. The Englishman lived in constant fear of 
life and goods ; he was liable at any moment to be called 



7o The Foundations of English Literature 

The Story of Wessex West-Saxon Literature 

out against the enemy. Whatever Httle civiHzation had 
ever existed in the country died out altogether." 

Wessex. The story of Alfred and the kingdom of 
Wessex that unaided and alone broke the Danish wave 
and gave to England a new era need not be dwelt upon. 
The great King brought order out of confusion ; he 
organized a regular and well-discipHned army and he built 
the first English navy ; he made laws and enforced them 
until perfect order reigned from the Thames southward 
to the sea; he rebuilt the ruined city of London; he re- 
stored communication with the continent; he reestab- 
lished the Church, founded schools, and with his own 
hand gave his countrymen the beginnings of a literature. 
During his reign was born the kingdom of England. 
958-975 Under the strong kings 

^^^g^" who followed him the 

rival provinces were 
united never again to be 
divided, and the founda- 
tions of modern England 
were laid broad and deep. 
The power of Wessex gradually increased until the era 
of Eadgar and Archbishop Dunstan, after which it 
rapidly declined. 

West-Saxon Literature. Reasoning from the analogy of 
Northumberland and its literary greatness we might ex- 
pect to find in Wessex the golden era of Anglo-Saxon 
literature. The soldiers of vElfred had faced a peril as 
awful as ever threatened England in the days of the 
Armada ; they were victorious after a desperate struggle 
by sheer English pluck and obstinacy ; they stood around 
a sovereign more worthy even than Elizabeth — a hero of 




Anglo-Saxon Literature 71 

Decline of the Church A Worldly, Practical Age 

colossal mold ; they saw the fatherland which they had 
hallowed with their blood taking a firm place, expanding, 
and developing. The strong, exultant spirit of patriot- 
ism, of action, of a new view of their ultimate destiny, 
was fierce within them. England was thrilling with a 
new life, a new hope. But no literary outpouring re- 
sulted, the fresh voice of the nation did not burst into 
song. The era was one of prose, of imitation, of transla- 
tion, of paraphrase. It was not creative ; it turned into 
its own dialect the songs that had burst a century before 
from the heart of Northumbria. 

The causes for this literary inactivity were many. The 
Church was in a sad state of decay. The enthusiasm, 
the apostolic freshness and sincerity that had marked the 
northern outburst of Christianity were wholly lacking. 
There had come the inevitable age of reaction. Asser 
declared that ** during many previous years the love of a 
monastic life had utterly decayed from the nation," that 
" they looked with contempt upon it." When Alfred 
commenced to reestablish the monasteries he had to 
send abroad even for the common brethren. But the 
growth was a forced one, and it soon became full of cor- 
ruption. The life of the spirit being thus dead, and the 
monasteries, which in this age were the only libraries and 
schools and centers of literary effort, having fallen to so 
low an ebb, it is not hard to account for the literary dead- 
ness of Wessex. It was a worldly, practical, material age 
that followed the era of song. Schools were founded for 
the laity, and learning became secular. Politics and the 
study of practical things took the place so long occupied 
by religion arid poetry. Prose treatises on medicine, law, 
history, philosophy, began to appear. From first to last 



']2 The Foundations of English Literature 

Other Causes of Literary Decline King Alfred 

it was an era of prose. As Caedmon, the earliest singer, 
dominated the whole chorus of Northumbrian song, so 
Alfred, the first West-Saxon writer, gave with his practi- 
cal and business-like translations the keynote for the whole 
literature of Wessex. Then, again, the south was less 
poetic than the north. The Celtic element — the genius, 
the enthusiasm, the wild fancy of the Irish, who had so 
influenced the Northumbrian poetry — was conspicuously 
absent. The wild natural scenery of the north, which 
was in itself an inspiration, had no counterpart in Wessex. 
There is another reason which almost of itself might ex- 
plain the absence of West-Saxon poetry. No poetic 
school can survive forever. The wild native note no 
longer satisfied; the mind of the nation was growing 
away from the ancient forms. This appears even in the 
later Northumbrian poetry. It is more and more full of 
experiment: rhyme, the dropping of alliteration, the 
varying of line length, the introduction of new meters. 
Everywhere in the little West-Saxon poetry that is 
left us is evident a groping for something new. But 
there was no new source of inspiration, and there arose 
no great creator who could draw out of the depths of 
his own genius the materials for a new cycle of song. 
It was not until the romance of Southern Europe had 
stirred the English heart that a new era began in English 
literature. 

/. King Alfred ( 8^g-Q0i) 

The most perfect character in history. — Freeman, 

Authorities. The earliest Life of Alfred is by Asser, 
the King's constant companion (Bohn) ; the most scholarly 
and critical Hfe is Dr. Pauli's (Bohn) ; the best popular 



Anglo-Saxon Literature T}) 



His Literary Ambitions His Translations 

life is Hughes' ; the best for the ordinary student is 
York-PoweU's, in Heroes of the Nations. 

In far-seeing sagacity, in benevolent enterprise, in hard- 
headed common sense and worldly wisdom, King Alfred 
reminds us of our own Benjamin Franklin. He was a liter- 
ary man for precisely the same reasons that he was a law- 
giver, a military and naval organizer, a builder of cities and 
churches, an educator. The destruction of the monas- 
teries and the degradation of the people had blotted out all 
learning and literature ; a nation could attain to no height 
of civilization without these, so the King with his own hand 
sought to spread among all his subjects the works that in 
his opinion would be of greatest educational value. 

Naturally the book that came first under the King's 
hand, when once he had determined to make a literature 
for his people, was that work which for many centuries, 
even to Chaucer's day, headed every list of " best books," 
— the Consolation of the Roman statesman and philos- 
opher, Boethius. Alfred turned this goethius' consoia- 
into a handbook of ethics and practical tion of philosophy. 

.J TT J -^ i.T_ t.1 r^u • Baeda's Ecclesiastical 

Wisdom. He made it thoroughly Chris- History, 
tian in sentiment; he removed from it all orosius' universal 
that might perplex his English readers, Grego°y^* Pastoral 
and by changing its allusions to persons Care. 
and places he gave it local color, so that the work, 
although a translation, is almost Alfred's own. From 
philosophy it is but a step to history. His subjects 
should know the history of their own land. There was 
but one book that could tell the story, the monumental 
work of Bseda. Alfred edited the text with judicious 
care, having constantly in mind the needs of his people. 
He abridged, corrected, commented, and added with a 



74 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Comments and Additions Translation of Cura Pastoralis 

free hand. From the history of England to a com- 
pendium of general history was a natural step. The best 
universal history then available was that by Orosius, a 
Spanish churchman, a work that had been written at the 
request of Pope Gregory. With this Alfred took even 
greater liberties than with the Bseda. The impress of his 
personality is everywhere upon it ; nowhere can one get 
a more charming conception of the King, of his homely, 
honest character, his view of life, his earnestness, his 
limitations, than by comparing this translation with the 
original. When he comes to Nero he comments freely 
upon the evils of tyranny and the duties of kings; he 
gives his conceptions of civil government and religious 
duty; he makes naive remarks concerning persons and 
events, and he sets the historian right concerning such 
things as the geography of Iceland and of Caesar's marches 
in Britain. In one place he breaks abruptly from the 
text to ^Wf^ a long account of the voyages of Othere and 
Wulfstan into the unknown seas to the north of Scandi- 
navia, as he had himself heard it from the lips of the 
adventurers. Last of all, the King, realizing the low re- 
ligious ebb to which his people had come, made for their 
spiritual nourishment a translation of Gregory's Cura 
Pastoralis. Upon this work the royal translator expended 
the greatest care. No book was more sadly needed. Its 
picture of the ideal Christian pastor, of his humility, un- 
selfishness, and unworldliness was in marked contrast 
with the actual Saxon churchman of the era. So zealous 
was the King in his work of reform that he prefaced his 
translation with an earnest exhortation to the clergy, and 
commanded that one copy of the book be sent to each 
bishop's see in the kingdom. 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 75 

His Use of the Vernacular The Saxon Chronicles 

It is significant that ^Elfred, in thus striving to educate 
his people, made use wholly of the vernacular. The 
Danish scourge gave new life to the English language. 
The English had learned out of sheer necessity to use 
their own tongue, when continental nations were using 
the Latin. As a result, while the South of Europe was 
speaking broken Latin and building up Romance lan- 
guages, England was speaking exclusively in her own 
tongue, and her King, who earnestly desired to bring back 
scholarship to his people, must do it in the vernacular or 
not at all. 

Thus did ^Elfred strive to promote in his kingdom 
learning, literature, and godliness. He realized fully the 
condition of himself and his subjects, and he could adapt 
his work to their needs. Thus it is that while his writings 
are translations merely, they are nevertheless permeated 
with his personality, and they must be reckoned with as 
among the most widely influential elements that have 
entered into the building up of the English character. 

Suggested Readings. Alfred's Boethius, with trans- 
lation (Bohn ed.); Sweet's Extracts from yElfred's 
Oroshis, Clarendon Press; Preface to Gregory's Cicra 
Pastoralis, and Bseda's account of Caedmon in Mac- 
Lean's Old and Middle English Reader ; the Preface of 
the Pastoral Care^ with extracts from that work, and the 
Voyages of Othere and Wulfstan, Bright's Anglo-Saxon 
Reader, 

2, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles 

(Earle, Ch. vii ; Two Saxon Chronicles Parallel, Plum- 
mer and Earle.) As if fully conscious of the ultimate 
greatness of the nation of which they were the founders, 
the early Saxons, especially the men of Wessex, took 



76 The Foundations of English Literature 

Their Great Value The Fight at Brunanburh 

great pains to hand down a record of the deeds of the 
fathers. The movement seems to have started in early 
Northumbria, perhaps with Baeda. There is much evi- 
dence that the Worcester Chronicle, for instance, is but 
an enlargement of a northern original. But we know 
that about the time of Alfred in all the leading monas- 
teries books were kept in which annually were recorded 
the leading events of the year. Seven of these old 
chronicles have come down to us, and it is needless to 
say that their value is inestimable ; that without them our 
knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon era would be fragmentary 
indeed. Altogether they cover the period between 449 
and 1 1 54, at first drawing almost wholly from Baeda, then 
continuing with short entries chiefly concerning kings and 
bishops, and later, during the glorious era of Wessex, 
swelling into really magnificent prose, varied here and 
there by an inserted battle poem, then falling off one by 
one until the Peterborough Chronicle alone remains to 
carry the story through the first century after the Con- 
quest. There are many gaps in the narrative, — long 
periods when all the chronicles are silent ; there are con- 
tradictions and false or worthless assertions ; but on the 
whole the chronicles agree remarkably. " It would be 
difficult to point to any texts," says Earle, ** through 
which the taste for living history — history in immediate 
contact with events — can better be cultivated." 

In 937, instead of making the usual prose entry, the 
chronicler burst into a metrical description of the battle 
of Brunanburh. In this poem and the one on the battle 
of Maldon, which took place in 991, we catch the last 
full strains of the Anglo-Saxon harp. 
Required Reading, Tennyson's translation of the 



Anglo-Saxon Literature ^'] 

Decline of Learning and Morality in Wessex 

Fight at Brunanbitrh. See also translation of this and 
the Fight at Maldon, by Garnett, in Elene. For text of 
the poems see most Anglo-Saxon Readers and Crow's 
Maldon and Brunanburh, Library of Anglo-Saxon Litera- 
ture, vol. iv. 

J. ^Ifric (c. g^^-c.i02o) 

He is the voice of that great Church reform which is the most signal fact 
in the history of the latter half of the tenth century. — Earle. 

Authorities. Ten Brink, Vol. i., pp. 133-140; Earle, 
Anglo-Saxon Literature, ch. x. ; Skeat, ^Ifric s Lives 
of the Saints, text and English translation ; Sweet, Se- 
lected Homilies of u!Fllfric, Clarendon Press; Azarius, 
Development of Old English Thought, Ch. viii. ; White, 
^Ifric, a New Study of his Life and Writings, with full 
bibliography, Yale Studies. 

The Monastic Revival. The writers of Wessex fall 
into two schools : the earlier group that gathered about 
Alfred and occupied itself mainly with translations, and 
the later group that gave voice to the great era of Church 
reform. The half century between Alfred and Eadgar 
was a time of material advancement; the kingdom of 
Wessex grew constantly in political power, but in learn- 
ing and morality it gradually waned. The spirit of re- 
action against the fervent religious life of the early days 
had been aided by the Danish wars. Utter barbarism 
had swept over Northern England, destroying every 
monastery and every manuscript. The kingdom of Wes- 
sex had thrown all of its energies into the life-and-death 
struggle with the invaders. Everything, even the 
Church, was forgotten in the fierce conflict. For a cen- 
tury the English mind was busy with practical things: 
problems of defense, of organization, of finance, of ma- 



78 The Foundations of English Literature 

Archbishop Dunstan ^Ifric 

terial development. All of the nation's energies and 
resources were demanded by its civil life. Despite the 
efforts of Alfred, the Church gradually lost its power, 
and as it declined, as it fell more and more into the 
hands of small and unspiritual men, it became more and 
more a center of corruption. The rule enforcing celibacy 
was broken down; " the education of the clergy," says 
White, *' and consequently of the people, had fallen with 
their morals and from the same causes." Everywhere 
the Church was drifting from the strict rules of the early 
days. 

It was at this point that a reformer arose, a strong, 
far-seeing man, who had gained from the throne almost 
absolute power. In thirty years, beginning in 959, Dun- 
stan, Archbishop of Canterbury, completely reorganized 
the English Church. He turned out the secular clergy, 
built new monasteries, and infused a new spirit into 
monastic life; he insisted upon the strictest asceticism; 
he revived to some degree the old spirit of learning and 
culture, and prepared the way for a new school of ecclesi- 
astical writers who worked almost wholly in prose. 

y^lfric. The central literary figure of the period was 
^Ifric, an ecclesiastic of the new movement, a man who 
combined the earnestness and the simple, unselfish zeal 
of Aldhelm and the early Christian workers with the 
practical common sense of King Alfred and the school 
of Wessex. Educated in the Benedictine monastery of 
Winchester at the time when it was, perhaps, the literary 
and intellectual center of England, ^Ifric had early been 
turned toward a scholarly life. The atmosphere of reform, 
of renewed holiness, and reawakened intellectual life that 
so filled his age early affected him, and it aroused in him 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 79 

His Homilies His Prose Style 

the missionary spirit. First at Winchester, then at the 
Abbey of Cernel, and finally at Eynsham, near Oxford, 
where in 1005 he was made abbot, he devoted himself 
with all the enthusiasm and earnestness of a Baeda to 
exhortation and teaching, to translation and literary pro- 
duction, and to humble work among all classes. Like 
Alfred, who in many respects was his predecessor, and 
like Wyclif, of whom he was the forerunner, he would 
reach the poor and the ignorant. A few works he wrote 
in Latin, but the most of his writings were for those 
who knew no tongue but their own. He made a Latin 
grammar, carefully adapting it to the needs of beginners, 
he translated parts of the Scriptures, he made compila- 
tions from the works of Baeda, he translated lives of the 
saints, and he wrote a large mass of sermons, in all of 
which he had constantly in mind the needs of the com- 
mon people. 

His Homilies, eighty in number, charming little ser- 
mons arranged for nearly every Sabbath and feast-day of 
the Christian year, are his best-known work. Few of them 
are original : they are adapted largely from St. Gregory 
and the Church Fathers, and they seldom wander far from 
the originals. Their charm lies in their artlessness and 
their wonderful adaptation to the audiences for which 
they were written. The author's first desire was to be 
understood by all, hence his simplicity and clearness. 
His lesson came from his heart, hence the power and the 
sweetness of his lines. They are readable even now with 
pleasure and spiritual profit. 

^Ifric s writings form the link between the old native 
poetry and the homely but strong native prose of Wyclif. 
The preacher would bring home to his simple hearers the 



8o The Foundations of English Literature 

The Transition to Prose Influence of ^Ifric 

great truths of holy writ ; he would make vivid to them 
the events of biblical history and the lives of the saints, 
and he appealed to the strongest literary passion within 
them, — the inborn love for the old Saxon minstrelsy. 
His prose is full of alliteration, of balanced structure, and 
even of rhyme. We can imagine the preacher telling the 
deeds of saints in the ** half-musical recitative " of the 
old gleemen, and arriving at much the same result as did 
they. ** -^Ifric's lives of saints," says Morley, ** are 
actually marked for rhythmical delivery by division into 
lines convenient for recitation. They are not poems, 
but they bring to the Church a form of story-telling, ap- 
plied to the lives of saints, that had been applied to the 
deeds of heroes in the mead-hall." 

The influence of ^Ifric, while not a great one, cannot 
be overlooked. His genius, like that of all the West- 
Saxon school, was not creative ; he added little that was 
strictly original to the sum of English literature; what 
influence he might have had as a stylist was well-nigh 
destroyed by the Norman Conquest, which relegated all 
Anglo-Saxon culture to the background ; yet the pure 
and earnest life of ^Ifric and the example of his clear 
and simple English were not wholly lost. His Hom- 
ilies were copied again and again until long after the 
Conquest, and while it is impossible to estimate ac- 
curately the part that they played in the formation of 
the prose of Wyclif, we know that it was by no means 
inconsiderable. 

The Era of Wessex^ then, despite the heroic efforts of 
T^lfred and the temporary blazing up of the embers 
during the reign of Eadgar, was a period of gradual 
literary decline. The Anglo-Saxon literature stood com- 



Anglo-Saxon Literature 8i 

The Decline of Anglo-Saxon Literature 

plete. It had begun in heat with a full, original note, but 
this had been repeated until it had become jaded and 
outworn. It had listened to no melodies but its own, and 
the inevitable result had followed. Artistic prose was a 
new variation ; it satisfied for a time, but new themes and 
new tones must come at length, or English song must be 
forever still. They came with appalling suddenness, in 
a way quite unlooked for. For two centuries and more 
the Anglo-Saxon voice was utterly silent, and when next 
it was heard it proclaimed that the old era had forever 
passed away and that a new and nobler one had begun. 

Suggested Reading. " The Creation " and " St. Cuth- 
bert " in Sweet's Selected Homilies of ^Ifric, Clarendon 
Press. 



TABLE I. — EARLY BRITAIN 



Celtic 
Britain. 



From Prehistoric times 
the Roman Conquest. 
43 A.D. 



until 



55 B.C. Caesar in Britain. 



Roman 
Britain. 



43-409. Roman Domination. 

409-449, Period of weakness. 
The withdrawal of the Ro- 
mans left England the prey 
of invaders. 



55. Defeat of Caractacus. 
61. Revolt of Boadicea. 
78-84. Agricola. 

409. Romans leave Britain. 

410. Sack of Rome by 
Alaric. 



449-597. Anglo-Saxon Con- 
quest. The Dark Period, 
since it blotted out Celtic 
Christianity and since it is 
unrecorded. 

597-686. Christian Conquest, 



Anglo- 
Saxon 
Britain. 



Struggle for 

the 

Overlordship 

597-867. 



588-685. Era of 
Northumbria. 
From the be- 
ginning of the 
kingdom to the 
death of Ecg- 
frith. 

685-828. Era of 
Mercia. 

828-1016, Era 
of Wessex. 

The appearance 
of the Danes 
ended the 
struggle for 
the overlord- 
ship of Britain. 



449-588, Era of settlement. 

597. Augustine lands in 
Kent. 

617-633. Eadwine of North- 
umbria, overlord, 

670-685, Ecgfrith of North- 
umbria, overlord, 

675-704. Ethelred of Mer- 
cia, overlord. 

716. Ethelbald of Mercia, 
overlord, 

758-796, Offa, Mercia at 
its height, 

787, Danes first land in 
England. 

828, Ecgberht of Wessex, 
overlord of England, 

866, First Danish settle- 
ment. 

867. Danes conquer North- 
umbria. 

871. Danes invade Wessex. 

871-901, Alfred. 

912, Northmen settle Nor- 
mandy. 

958-975. Eadgar. Wessex 
at its height, 

1013, All England submits 
to the Danes, 



Anglo- 
Danish 
Britain 



1016-1042, England under 
Danish kings. Since 866 the 
Danes had been pouring into 
England, until the island was 
almost as much Danish as 
Saxon, 



1016-1035, Cnut, 
1035-1042, Harold 
Harthacnut. 



and 



Anglo- 
Norman 
Britain. 



From 1042, when Edward the 
Confessor filled the English 
court with Normans, until the 
days of Edward III., when 
the two races became finally 
blended. 



1042-1066, Edward the Con- 
fessor, 
1066-1087. William I. 



TABLE II. — LITERATURE OF THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE, 

449-1016 

From the Settlement to tJie Danish Conquest 



I. The Primal Poetry. Dates unknown. 
First copied in Northumbria, per- 
haps by the School of York. Era 
of the scop and gleeman. 



II. The Northumbrian School. 680- 
782. From Caedmon to the depar- 
ture of Alcuin from York. 

1. C^DMON. d. 680. 

2. The C^dmon Cycle. Codex Jun- 

iensis, Bodleian. Author sup- 
posed to be Csedmon. 

3. B^DA, 673-735. Wrote in Latin. 

Foremost scholar of his age. 

4. Cynewulf. Known only through 

runes affixed to four Anglo-Saxon 
poems. A few personal facts 
known through internal evidence. 

5. The Cynewulfian Cycle. Un- 

signed poems supposed to have 
been written by Cynewulf or his 
disciples. 



6. The Author of Judith. 

7. The Scholars of York. Best 

known figure, Alcuin. 
The complete wreck of Northumbria 
by the Danes closed the era and 
created a century of darkness. 
III. The Era of JVessex, 871-1016. 
From Alfred to Cnut. 

1. Alfred (849-goi). Tried by trans- 

lation to give a vernacular litera- 
ture to his people. 

2. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. 

Several original songs inserted. 

3. ^LFRic (c. 955-c. 1020). Revived 

English prose. 
The era was a minor one of transla- 
tion. Few works showing crea- 
tive power produced until long 
after the Norman Conquest. 

83 



Beowulf. 

The Fight a Finnesbruh, 

Waldhere. 

The Wanderer. 

The Seafarer. 

The Lament of Deor, 



Song of the Creation. 
Genesis 
Exodus. 
Daniel. 

Christ and Satan. 
Ecclesiastical History of Eng- 
land, 
yuliana. 
Christ. 

Fates of the Apostles. 
Elene. 
Riddles. 
Guthlac. 

Descent into Hell. 
The Phoenix. 
The Vision of the Rood. 
Andreas, 



Translations of Boethius, 

' ' Bcsda. 

' ' Orosius. 

' ' Gregory. 

Fight at Brunanburh. 

" Maldon. 
Homilies. 



CHAPTER VII 

NORMAN ENGLAND 

1066- I 3 50 

Authorities, The standard authority is Freeman, 
Norman Conquest ; the same author's Short History of the 
Norman Conquest covers the same field in epitome. Valu- 
able short studies of the Conquest are Johnson, The 
Normans in Europe, in the Epoch series; and Hunt, 
Norman England, The most useful histories of the Eng- 
lish language are Lounsbury's and Emerson's. 

The Anglo-Saxon Era with its six centuries of isolation 
stands as a unique phenomenon in European history. 
When Italy and France and Germany were mere amor- 
phous fragments of the Roman wreck, without individual- 
ity or fixed tongue, England had already evolved a marked 
personality, had supplied herself with a language, and 
had produced in it writings of surprising strength and 
variety. The Anglo-Saxon school of literature had 
arisen, flourished, and decayed before a single significant 
note had been sounded in the chorus of modern continen- 
tal song. From every standpoint the era seems unique 
and lonely. A century and more of complete literary 
unproductiveness separated it from modern English 
literature, and when the silence was at length broken it 
was with a new tongue so unlike the old that the writings 
of Caedmon and Alfred must now be read with lexicon 
and notes, like those of a foreign land. 

On the Eve of the Conquest. Before leaving this well 
rounded and most important era, let us for a moment 

84 



Norman England 



Pre-Norman England A Rude, Warlike People 

look over England and note the changes which had been 
wrought by six centuries. The island was still a wild 
and barbarous land. Great forests full of wolves and 
wild boars and stags covered half its area, and in the 
east and south, where now are fertile meadows, there 
stretched vast sea-marshes screamed over by wild swan 
and heron. The fierce sea-rovers of earlier centuries had 
abandoned their ships and had settled down as landlords 
and farmers, and, as in the days of Tacitus, flocks and 
herds had become their chief wealth. Commerce, aside 
from a small trade in hides and wool and slaves exchanged 
for a few articles of luxury, there was none. Only the 
river-bottoms and the richest lands had been reclaimed 
for agriculture. Roads, with the exception of rude paths, 
were confined to the neighborhood of towns. Trans- 
portation was difficult, and communication with distant 
points was a work of time. 

The legal codes reveal to us a people but little changed 
at heart from the fierce invaders of earlier days. They 
were still given to brawling and fighting and feuds, which 
ended often in blood. A statute had to be enacted to 
make it a crime to draw weapons in the public assembly. 
Murder, as in the time of Beowulf, was atoned for by the 
payment of blood-money according to the rank of the 
victim. The most severe penalties were connected with 
treachery to a lord. Woman was still protected and 
honored. As in the days of Tacitus, the stranger who 
approached a dwelling without shouting or blowing his 
horn was declared an outlaw and slain. Despite six 
humanizing centuries, the Englishman was still coarse 
and brutal, addicted to drunkenness, and, aside from a 
small class mostly to be found in the monasteries, he was 



86 The Foundations of English Literature 

Social Classes An Illiterate People 

unlettered and grossly ignorant. He had added to that 
wild barbaric freedom which had made the perfect union 
of the different tribes almost impossible, an insular con- 
tempt for all the world beyond his little domain. 

Outside the cities, society fell roughly into three groups : 
the gentleman class, — eorls or thanes, a large division 
which embraced all landholders from the great lord of 
noble birth down to the small landlord whose claim to 
distinction was the possession of five hides of land ; the 
middle class, or churls, who worked the farms, who must 
go with the land they tilled, but who were allowed to 
hold land of their own; and, last of all, the thralls or 
slaves, remnants largely of the conquered Welsh, a de- 
graded class, of which Wamba in Ivanhoe is a true picture. 
Fundamentally the society of the era was a feudal one. 
It was a recognized law that every churl or thrall must be 
attached to a lord or be declared an outlaw. The popu- 
lation was divided into groups, — great families, of which 
the thane was the head and his residence the center. 
Around it were arranged the rude huts of thrall and 
churl, who not only tilled the land but carried on a 
variety of industries, so that the little community was 
self-supporting and independent. Thus towns were 
rendered unnecessary. The members of this group 
usually passed their lives on the estate where they were 
born, seldom during their whole lives wandering beyond 
its limits. With very few exceptions, churls and thralls, 
and even thanes, were illiterate. The noble families 
might seek education, and even in later days send their 
sons to the French schools, but the great majority could 
neither read nor write. It must not be forgotten that 
almost all the literature produced in England up to 



Norman England Sy 

The English Language The Viking Age 

Chaucer's day was written to be read or recited aloud to 
interested listeners who were themselves unable to read. 

The best land in the island was in the hands of the 
monasteries, whose stone walls, the only substantial 
architecture of the time, arose on every hand. These 
vast estates were worked by the monks with diligence 
and skill, so that the monasteries not only became self- 
supporting, but they yielded a surplus for trade. They 
were, moreover, manufacturing centers where skilled 
workmen congregated and wrought. Their influence 
has already been dwelt upon. The civilization of early 
England rose and fell just in proportion as these centers 
of intellectual energy waxed or waned. 

There was as yet no national language. The nature of 
the settlement of Britain and the provincial character of 
the early history of the island had encouraged dialects, 
traces of which exist even to this day. At the time of 
the Conquest three were prominent : the Northern, the 
Midland, and the Southern, corresponding generally with 
the chief provinces of the island. These dialects differed 
widely. A man of Devonshire could hardly understand 
a man of York. Which of these dialects was to win and 
become the language of England ? For three centuries, 
even until the days of Chaucer, the question remained 
unanswered. 

Suggested Reading. Klngsley's Her eward tke Wake ; 
Lytton's Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings. 

Normandy. (Du ChsiillUj The Viking Age.) The wave 
of Scandinavian invasion which in the ninth and tenth 
centuries rolled with such disastrous results upon Britain, 
fell with equal fury upon the lands across the Channel. 



88 The Foundations of English Literature 

Settlement of Normandy The Norman Conquest 

No sooner was the great Charlemagne dead than the 
black ships of the Northmen began to appear off every 
coast from the Rhine to the Tiber. For two centuries 
Western Europe lived in a perpetual reign of terror. 
Band after band of Vikings, saturated with slaughter, 
settled in the provinces of Gaul and quickly adopting 
the language and customs of the natives, were lost to 
view. Southern Europe received a fresh infusion of 
blood that was soon to put a new spirit into continental 
888. Final Division of history. Only onc Northman band re- 

chariemagne's Em- taincd to any degree its identity. The 
888!'^koiio Besieges g^^^^ Viking leader, Rolf or Rollo, had 

Paris. sailed up the Seine as far as Paris, but, 

^Franks.° ^ ^ ^^ bcatcn off there, had dropped down the 
912. Normandy Grant- rivcr and taken possession of Rouen and 
912. Riseof Germany, the adjacent territory. So strong was 
962. Riseof Italy. j^ig position that the West Frank King, 
Charles the Simple, made a treaty with him precisely as 
Alfred had done with Guthrum in England, fixing the 
bounds beyond which he might not go. Thus arose the 
duchy of Normandy. The sea-rovers settled down as 
landlords and farmers; they married native wives, and 
with their usual versatility adopted the customs of the 
country. The children of the second generation, trained 
from infancy by French mothers, spoke the French 
tongue, and within a century the Normans, as they were 
now called, had become in reality a French people. 

The Norman Conquest. Under the successors of Rollo, 
Normandy became the leading province of France. It 
extended its territory and under William, the seventh 
duke, who proved to be one of the commanding figures 
in the world's history, successfully opposed even the 



Norman England 89 

The Claims of William Importance of Understanding his Position 

French king himself. But William's ambitions lay in 
another direction. For a long time a chain of circum- 
stances had been forming to draw together England and 
Normandy. The last of the Saxon kings before the 
Danish interregnum had married Emma, daughter of the 
third Norman duke. Their son Edward, afterwards called 
the Confessor, was reared and educated in France, 
whither his father had fled upon the accession of Cnut, 
and when he was called to take the English throne he 
went in reality as a prince who had inherited a foreign 
kingdom. He filled his court with French nobles, to 
whom he gave many important offices and estates. From 
first to last his reign was more Norman than English. 
Upon his death, Duke William, the Norman ruler, an- 
nounced himself as his legal successor, and the winning 
of what the great Duke considered his just rights quickly 
followed. 

The Norman Conquest cannot be rightly understood 
without a careful consideration of William's position. He 
considered himself not a usurper but the true heir to the 
throne. His chief claims were four in number: through 
the mother of Edward he was in the royal line; the King 
had solemnly sworn to name him as his successor; Har- 
old had also sworn to support him in his claim ; the heir 
apparent had been set aside, and Harold, a perjurer, a man 
not of royal blood, had been elected King. Furthermore, 
the Pope had sanctioned the Duke's claim. However 
flimsy these pretensions may seem to-day, to William they 
were real and amply sufficient. It is doubtful whether for 
a moment he questioned his legal right to the throne. In 
every action of his later life he bore himself like a true 
and lawful king, who to gain his throne had to overcome 



90 The Foundations of English Literature 

Obstinacy of the English Their Punishment 

a rebellion headed by a usurper. This fact alone stamps 
the Norman Conquest as radically different from all earlier 
invasions. In the guise of direct successor of Edward 
and the Saxon line of kings, William could not displace 
the old institutions. He made no attempt to change 
the laws and the customs of the land or to alter the 
condition of the people otherwise than strictly according 
to the ancient laws. Those who had opposed him in his 
struggle for the throne were rebels, and as such their 
property was confiscate to the Crown. Those who had 
aided him deserved reward. If the greater part of the 
land of England changed from Saxon to Norman hands 
it was simply because the greater part of the Saxon 
landholders were disloyal to their King. Grant the absurd 
claim, so fully believed by William, and all the usurpation 
and oppression that followed are logical and inevitable. 

Results of the Conquest. The sullen obstinacy of the 
English character, its tenacity, its stubborn fierceness, its 
unconquerable spirit even in the face of inevitable de- 
feat have never been more conspicuous than during the 
struggle with William. The battle of Hastings was only 
the beginning. With marvelous energy the King crushed 
down opposition; he moved without hesitancy; he pun- 
ished with frightful severity ; he blotted out entire com- 
munities and confiscated whole shires — yet the English 
fought sullenly on. It was this unparalleled stubbornness, 
this dogged refusal to submit to the inevitable, that makes 
the Norman Conquest seem like the destruction of all 
landmarks. The island indeed passed through a furnace. 
At the close of William's reign the old nobility had well- 
nigh disappeared. The land was in the hands of Norman 
lords, whose great castles with their massive square towers 



Norman England 91 

Results of the Conquest Evil Elements Introduced 

arose from every estate ; society had practically reduced 
itself to two classes, Normans and Saxons. The old 
thanes had been thrust down, and the slaves had in reality 
become free, for the new lords made no distinctions. All 
who spoke the English tongue were looked upon with 
contempt — they were the ignorant masses who deserved 
neither consideration nor law. French was the language 
of court and hall ; French ideas and French songs, save 
in the hovels of the poor and about the hearthstones of 
a few who had known better days, ruled supreme. 

William's temperament was cold and merciless: he did 
few things in heat ; he could cut like a surgeon to the 
very heart of things, heedless of present agony, mindful 
only of the future. The treatment was heroic, but it 
made England what she is to-day. In reality the great 
King cut away only weak elements. The curse of Eng- 
land from earliest times had been disunion ; the fire that 
William kindled welded the island forever into a unity. 
The Conquest taught the English for the first time the 
meaning of discipline ; it cut them forever from the bar- 
barous North, and by bringing them into contact with 
the continent, modified to some degree their insular nar- 
rowness. It brought a fresh infusion of Celtic blood 
which tempered the sullen Northern gloom, and added 
vivacity and culture without weakening at all the stronger 
elements in the national character. Moreover it changed 
and strengthened the national tongue and the national 
literature. 

But not all the changes brought in by William were 
destined to bear good fruit. The Conquest firmly estab- 
lished feudalism in England. The King gave confiscated 
lands as rewards for personal service, but he considered 



92 The Foundations of English Literature 

English Feudalism Norman Traits 

the acceptance of these estates as a pledge for future serv- 
ice. Thus arose the barons, an active, warlike class des- 
tined to become a dominant factor in English history until 
after the Wars of the Roses. Each baron had jurisdic- 
tion over a large district in the midst of which stood his 
castle, erected by Saxon toil. The inhabitants were ac- 
countable chiefly to the baron, in whose complete power 
they were ; the baron was accountable only to the king. 
The villeins could do nothing without their lord's con- 
sent; they paid their rents by laboring upon his land 
whenever he called, and they were to be ever ready to do 
his will in case of war. They had little hope of bettering 
their condition ; they received no education ; they were 
punished most frightfully for the smallest infringement of 
the laws; they were secure in nothing. The baron and 
his friends, while on their hunts, galloped through and 
through the Saxon's grain, and he in return must refresh 
and entertain them without recompense when they called 
at his door. The Conquest put an end to real slavery in 
England, but it left the great majority of the English- 
speaking race in a condition but little removed from 
bondage. 

Norman Traits. Since the Norman was the last im- 
portant element to enter the crucible from which emerged 
the English personality, it will be necessary to consider 
carefully his characteristics and his attainments. He 
brought to England nothing radically new. In blood he 
was allied in different degrees to all the peoples of Brit- 
ain. ** In political ideas," says Hunt, ** in culture, and 
in habits of social life England was in advance of her 
conquerors." The Normans had little originality; they 
adopted everywhere the institutions and the customs of 



Norman England 93 

A Masterful Race The Successors of William 

others. In England they yielded in time to their own 
servants, and gave up their institutions and even their 
language. They had no original literature, no arts, no 
refinement, of their own. They were religious but not 
moral; they founded churches everywhere and obeyed 
punctiliously the demands of the Church, but they knew 
nothing of practical morality. In marked contrast with 
the Saxons, they degraded woman. They condemned 
the English habits of gluttony and drunkenness, but after 
a brief period they fell into the same vices themselves. 
How, then, could the Normans add strength to the 
English character ? Because they opened a permanent 
channel between England and the Romance world ; but 
chiefly because, despite their failings, they furnished the 
best possible alloy, or rather flux, for the English char- 
acter. The Norman was a blend of the North with 
the South, unlike either of the original elements, richer 
and stronger, as copper and tin blend into bronze. The 
Norman energy, indomitable vigor, and love of adventure, 
together with the Norman heaviness, coarseness, and 
gloom, found as its complement the Gallic culture, its bril- 
liancy, nimble fancy, and lightness, its impulsiveness, its 
roseate view of life. Seldom has there been a better mar- 
riage than that between the Northman and the Gaul. It 
resulted in the new type whose characteristics we have dis- 
cussed, — an intensely active, masterful, buoyant race, the 
soul of the Crusades, the dominating element in later Eu- 
ropean history. It was just the metal needed in the Eng- 
lish crucible. It fused the whole mass into a stable unity. 
The Later Kings. During the century covered by the 
four Norman kings feudalism in England reached its 
highest point. The barons strove to divide the island 



94 The Foundations of English Literature 



Their Imperious, Active Reigns The Early Plantagenets 

into a number of vast estates, over each of which there 

might be an absolute ruler, — a dream which if realized 

would have made England a perpetual 

William, 1066-1087. , ,^, , TU c ^u n 

William Rufus, -iioo. battk-ground. The sons of the Con- 
Henry,-ii35. qucror werc virtually despots; they were 

Stephen, -1154. ^ „ • • -.t, 

small, mean men m comparison with 
their father, but they had inherited in full measure his 
imperious, active temperament, and this alone saved Eng- 
land. They curbed the barons with ruthless hand, and 
for a time at least they brought the crown into close 
contact with the English masses. The two races were 
brought a step nearer each other by the marriage of 
Henry I. to the Saxon Princess Matilda. As the years 
went by, more and more of the Norman nobility took Eng- 
lish wives, and thus silently and slowly the two factions be- 
gan to fuse into one people. The fierce rule of William and 
his sons established the unity of England. Had a feeble 
sovereign, like Stephen, succeeded the Conqueror, the re- 
sult would have been hopeless anarchy and confusion. 

The century and a half covered by the early Plantag- 
enets is the most picturesque era in EngHsh history. It 
Henry II., 1154-1189. was a time of storm and change, of great 
Richard I -1199. j^gj^ ^^^ heroic deeds. It resounds with 

John, -1210. 

Henry III., -1272. the shouts of Crusadcrs and glitters with 
Edw'd n::-x°32'7. the trappings of knights and the splendors 
Edward III,, 1377- of toumaments. Over it all hangs the 
romantic haze of the Middle Ages, rendered yet more 
romantic by novelist and poet. It was a time of rapid 
transition. During this era the tough elements in the 
English cauldron fused into their final form. Gaul and 
Teuton blended at last into one; Anglo-Saxon and 
Romance hardened into EngHsh. The era was opened 



Norman England 95 

Gradual Blending of Saxon and Norman 

by Henry of Anjou, the grandson of Henry I., an organ- 
iser well-nigh as great as the Conqueror. Under his strong 
hand the barons, who had broken over all bounds during 
the reign of Stephen, were curbed and conquered. He 
destroyed no less than eleven hundred castles, which like 
foul growths of the night had sprung up over all the 
land. He enforced without mercy, even upon churchman 
and noble, the full penalties of the old English law. It 
was the vigorous reign of Henry that gave the death- 
blow to English feudalism. For centuries, even until 
after the Wars of the Roses, the rubbish of this great 
ruin encumbered the land, but it was no longer a living 
and growing organism. The kingdom was soon bound 
more firmly together by the struggle that now arose be- 
tween England and Anjou and that culminated during 
the romantic reign of Richard ** the absentee," who was 
in every respect a foreigner. ** England became a mere 
province of Anjou " ; Norman and Saxon had a common 
cause, and they fought shoulder to shoulder for their 
common fatherland. Under John and Henry HI. the 
struggle was renewed. All were English now, fighting 
against foreign favorites and the whole outside world. 
The Magna Charta, which was a victory for the old Eng- 
lish liberties wrested by the combined force of Norman 
and Saxon from a tyrannical king, broke down the last 
barrier. Soon it was no longer possible to tell who was 
Norman and who was Saxon, for all were Englishmen. 

Suggested Readings. Scott's The Talisman (1193); 
Ivanhoe (1194); Shakespeare's King John (1199-1216); 
Jane Porter's Scottish Chiefs (1297); Scott's Castle 
Dangerous (1306); Lord of the Isles (1307); Marlowe's 
Edward II , (1327). 



CHAPTER VIII 

ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE 

Authorities. Morley, Vols. ii. and iii. ; Ten Brink, 
Bk. i. ; Craik, English Literature and Language, Vol. i. ; 
Saint sbury, Flourishing of Romance ; 'EXW.s^ Early English 
Metrical Romances (Bohn); Rhys, Studies in the Arthur- 
ian Legend. 

The Barren Period. The old native literature which 
had shone so brilliantly during the Northumbrian era, 
which had reflected its Hght upon the Wessex of Alfred, 
and which had flickered fitfully under the hands of Dun- 
stan and ^Ifric, went out entirely at the first shock 
of the Conquest. A solitary spark, the Peterborough 
Chronicle, smoldered sullenly on amid the waste, but 
even that went out in the last year of Stephen. For a 
century and a half the field of vernacular literature lay in 
darkness. This barren waste in English literary history, 
which covers the whole Norman period and a large part 
of the Angevin, is easily accounted for. At the coming 
of William to England, the Church of the island, which 
included almost the entire literary class, opposed him 
and thus felt the full force of his crushing policy. The 
writers of books disappeared ; they were cut down ; they 
became wanderers and outcasts, and in their places came 
Normans and Frenchmen. The Church and with it all 
other centers of culture passed at once into the hands of 
foreigners. There was no attempt to thrust upon the 
people the language of the conquerors, but since the 
Norman held court and hall and church, French became 

96 



Anglo-Norman Literature 97 

Later Chroniclers . William of Malmesbury 

inevitably the polite language of Britain, while the Eng- 
lish became the tongue of the masses, of the unlettered 
and the poor. 

The Later Chroniclers. The first-fruits of the Conquest 
were Latin chronicles. The Norman bishops whom 
William had distributed over England Florence of worces- 
were scholarly men. They revived learn- ^^^' "^9- 

•^ -^ Geoffrey of Mon- 

mg m the monasteries, and to some mouth, 1128. 
degree they awakened a new literary '^iiiiam of Maimes- 

, . bury, 1142. 

enthusiasm. The old Saxon passion for oderic vitaiis, 1150. 
chronicles was revived and directed, as in ^l""'^ °^ Hunting- 

don, 1154. 

Baeda's day, into Latin channels. No Roger de Hoveden, 
less than a score of these old records have ,,J^.°^,'. . ^, 

William of Ne w- 

come down to us. They were no longer burgh, 1208. 
anonymous as in the days of Wessex; the writers had 
more of the spirit of the modern historian. They broke 
away, many of them, from the dry annalistic forms of 
the ecclesiastical chroniclers and took broad views of their 
subjects. They delved, like Baeda, into contemporary 
documents, striving constantly for fulness and accuracy ; 
to a large degree they divested themselves of religious 
prejudice; they even grasped the philosophic import of 
measures and periods, and they narrated their stories in a 
lively, interesting way. Perhaps the greatest of the 
group was William of Malmesbury, who wrote a history 
of England from 449 to 1143, a work of the utmost value 
to the student of this period. 

(Nearly all of these chronicles, many of them with 
translations, may be found in Bohn's Antiquarian 
Library.) 

The Flourishing of Ro7nance. From the chronicle of 
cold fact it was but a step to the record of legend and 



gS The Foundations of English Literature 

The Rise of Romance Influence of the Crusades 

the whole wide province of romance. Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth had written as real history the half-mythical tales 
of the Celtic Arthur and the enchanter Merlin. In the 
earlier days these would have rested unchanged, as did 
the romantic episodes in Baeda, but a new spirit was in 
the air. The twelfth century in Europe was electric with 
romance. Where originated this new spirit which for two 
centuries and more was to dominate European song, 
and who gave the final impulse, whether Scandinavian, 
Arabian, or Celt, is a problem for scholars. We know, 
however, that the new movement, whatever its parent- 
age, was nurtured and developed by the Crusades. Men 
from every nation were thrown together; thousands who 
had never before left their native province hurried into 
far lands, came in contact with ancient civilizations, lived 
for a time in a whirl of romantic action, in the dreamy 
Orient. They learned to their amazement that those 
whom they had looked upon as barbarians possessed a 
culture and a civilization finer, perhaps, than their own; 
that the despised East had a chivalry and a religious 
devotion that could satisfy the highest Western ideals. 
They returned to Europe with a new horizon, and they 
told tales which to their less adventurous hearers were 
like the fabric of dreams. The Crusades quickened the 
pulse of Europe and set on fire its imagination. In the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Western world had 
almost no literature save the epic romance. It was the 
era of the troubadours in Provence, of the trouveres in 
Northern France, of the minnesingers in Germany, of 
the Scaldic singers in the North with their eddas and 
sagas. It produced the Gesta Romanorum, The Nibe- 
lungenliedj The Romance of the Rose, and the cycle of 



Anglo-Norman Literature 99 



The ArthurianLegend Walter Map 

Arthurian poems which has so cast its j^^j^^^.^ j^„^^, ^-a,. 
spell over later English literature. It was *^^'"- ^ , 

'■ ° Tennyson's Idyls of 

this warm breath from the South that the King. 
stirred again to life the ruins of Engish Amoid-s Tristram and 

^ ° Iseult. 

song. But there was to be a lingering Morris' Defense of 
springtime. Not until there came a sec- Q^'e^t's'^Medin. 
ond impulse from over the sea in Chau- Swinburne's Arthur- 
cer's day did the field burst into bloom. ^^" °^"^^' 

T/ie Legend of Arthur, The new literature had come 
early to England. In court and hall during all the Nor- 
man era trouveres and jongleurs had sung in French the 
romances of Roland and of Charlemagne. Doubtless 
many of the Cha7iso7is de Geste were made by Norman 
singers on English soil. But the movement was not 
national; it came late to the people, and the medium 
through which it came at last was the legend of Arthur. 
The romantic history of Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1155 
was turned into old French verse by the Norman Wace, 
and thus it passed at once into the current of romance. 
The Charlemagne cycle was fast losing its charm, and 
the Arthurian legend, caught up by Breton minstrels, at 
once replaced it. During the reign of Henry II. the 
legend was entirely reorganized, perhaps by WALTER 
Map (b. 1137), a French-speaking native of the Welsh 
border and a prominent member of the King's court. 
The new poet, — and he must rank with the greatest liter- 
ary creators of all time, — threw over the Arthur story 
the twilight glow, the religious fervor of the Crusade era. 
He added the episode of the Holy Grail, and so trans- 
formed the entire legend that he may almost be said to 
have created it. He molded it into a unity and gave 
it a spiritual purpose. The cycle has been changed 



loo The Foundations of English Literature 

The Transition to English Norman-French Translations 

only in minor details since it left the hand of this great 
master. 

The Renaissance of the Vernacular. It is a significant 
fact that the first important poem in English written 
after the Conquest, or indeed after the days of Dunstan, 
was inspired by a Norman-French version of the Arthur 
legend. Wace had turned the Latin work of an English 
monk into French epic verse for the amusement of those 
who spoke no English, and now Layamon, another native 
monk, was to complete the circle by translating Wace 
into English, that those who spoke no French might 
share the enjoyment of the new literature heretofore 
confined to court and hall. The Brut of Layamon is 
almost purely Saxon in its diction, and prevailingly 
Saxon in its metrical arrangement, but it nevertheless 
shows most clearly the workings of the new leaven that 
for a century and more had been permeating England. 
That the poet left out almost entirely the vigorous verse- 
ring, the poetic compounds, the fire and thrill of the old 
gleemen, may perhaps be explained by the fact that he 
was an inferior singer. But despite its Saxon garb the 
poem is Norman in its turn of expression, its frequent 
rhymes, its intellectual horizon, and its view of life. The 
Anglo-Saxon harp, though uncaptured by the conquerors, 
was being retuned to the Norman pitch. That this was 
true is shown by the popularity of the Brut and its im- 
mediate successors in the same field. Great numbers of 
English poems rapidly followed, all of them imitated or 
translated from the Norman-French, like The Owl and 
the Nightingale, Havelok the Dane, Guy of Warwick, 
Floris and Blanchefleur, and many others. Beginning 
about 1250, they continued for nearly a century to be 



Anglo-Norman Literature loi 

A Period of Rapid Change Literary Products in English 

the most voluminous and popular productions of the 
period. 

But the new inspiration for which the Anglo-Saxon 
literature had so long waited came when the people and 
the language were powerless to produce a new school of 
original writers. England, although a political unity, 
was a confusion of tongues. The French was yielding 
to English as a spoken language, but the English was in 
an unstable condition. During the century and a half in 
which it had been a vulgar tongue, unwritten and unfash- 
ionable, it had become corrupted and changed. It had 
lost its inflections and modified its constructions. When 
once the two races had begun to unite, the change had 
been very rapid. The French began to ** pour into 
English," says Marsh, ** the greatest infusion of foreign 
words and foreign idioms which any European tongue 
ever received from a foreign source." Besides this there 
were three widely different dialects of English, and it 
was uncertain as yet which was to win. A distinctly 
national literature was impossible in such a language; 
and even were it possible, the people were not yet suf- 
ficiently welded into a unity to bring about such a con- 
summation. It was not until the days of Edward III. 
that the English nation awoke to the realization of 
fatherland and to the consciousness of a glorious future, 
which for the first time made a really national literature 
possible. 

In the meantime all literary effort was sporadic, but 
the product was more and more in the English tongue. 
In the Midland dialect, in addition to the Bru^, was 
written the Ormulum, a series of metrical homilies, which, 
although exceedingly valuable to the philologist, are 



I02 The Foundations of English Literature 

A Period of Preparation Rise of Universities 

almost destitute of literary value; in the Southern dialect 
we have the rhyming Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, 
and The Ancren Riwle, or Rules for Nuns ; and the North 
has preserved for us such writings as the Cursor Mundi 
and The Prick of Conscience, These works only empha- 
size the fact of the utter barrenness of the era from the 
Conquest to Edward III. From a merely literary stand- 
point not a single work was produced of the first or even 
of the second rank. It was a period of preparation, of 
transition ; it built up a language and molded a people, 
but left behind it no finished art. The creation of the 
Arthurian legend opened a vast quarry from which suc- 
ceeding poets have drawn materials for imposing struc- 
tures, but the era produced no masterwork. It furnished 
tools and raw material and inspiration for later workers, 
but it was powerless to do more. 

(See Morris* Specimens of Early English^ Part L, 1150- 
1300.) 

The Rise of Universities. The Crusades not only 
stirred the imagination of Europe and enlarged its hori- 
zon, but, by revealing the treasures of Oriental scholarship, 
they gave a new impulse to Western education. They, 
more than any other influence, caused the rapid rise of 
universities in the twelfth century. By the end of the 
century the universities of Paris, Bologna, and Salerno 
were preeminent, and it was through Paris that the new 
impulse entered England. During the Norman era, when 
Britain and France were in close contact, the wealthy 
classes had sent their sons across the Channel for the 
education that the island could not furnish them. The 
stream grew ever greater, until in the days of Henry II. 
thousands of English learners sat at the feet of Abelard 



Anglo-Norman Literature 103 

Intolerance of the Universities Roger Bacon 

and other masters who gathered at the University of 
Paris. The return of these scholars did much to stimu- 
late English learning. Oxford and Cambridge, old 
centers of monastic training, burst into vigor as universi- 
ties, and by the opening of the fourteenth century took 
rank even with Paris and Salerno. 

The university movement, however, which promised 
for a time to produce a new intellectual era, accomplished 
little. It was but a rattling of dry bones. There could 
be no intellectual advancement where the student must 
never leave the circular rut worn by ages of scholastic 
feet. Originality was heresy. With literature in the 
vernacular the schools could have no sympathy. The 
great intellectual and literary movement of Chaucer's day 
got from them discouragement rather than help ; indeed, 
when we inquire into the causes for the quick decline of 
this most briUiant era, and the long succeeding era of 
darkness, we find the universities a prominent factor. 

And yet this great scholastic movement cannot be 
overlooked. It produced the ferment from which grew 
the Reformation, and it produced also the most com- 
manding intellectual figure of the era, — Roger Bacon, 
who stands at the portals of modern science. But 
Bacon's great Latin work, " at once the encyclopaedia 
and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century," 
need not be discussed here, since it belongs not to litera- 
ture but to pure science. 



TABLE III. — LITERATURE OF THE NORMAN PERIOD, 
1066-13 50 



Latin and French. 

latin chronicles. 
1 1 19. Florence of Worcester. 
1 128. Geoffrey of Monmouth, 
1 142. William of Malmesbury. 
1 1 50. Oderic Vitalis. 
II 54. Henry of Huntingdon. 
1202. Roger de Hoveden. 
1208. William of Newburgh, 
and others. 

ANGLO-NORMAN ROMANCE. 

Walter Map (d. 12 10). 

De Nugis Curialium (Court 
Gossip in Latin). 

Goldias. 

Lancelot du Lac. 

Queste de St. Graal. 

Mort Artus. 
Various Romances of Arthur. 

The story of Arthur in the 
Latin Chronicle of Geoffrey of 
Monmouth was expanded and 
turned into French by the Nor- 
man Wace, whose work in turn 
was translated into English by 
Layamon. Map added other 
episodes to the romance. 



English. 
Northern. Cursor 
Mundi. 

The Prick of Con- 
science. 
Midland. Chron- 
icle, 1123-1131. 

Chronicle, ii54. 

Ormulum, 1200. 

Genesis and Exo- 
dus, 1230-1250. 

Harrowing of 
Hell, c. 1350. 
(Earliest Eng- 
lish drama). 

Robert of Brunne. 

Southern. Cotton 

Homilies, 1 1 50. 

Hatton Gospels, 
1 1 70. 

Layamon's Brut, 
1203. 

Ancr en Riwle, 
1220 (?). 

Robert of Glouces- 
ter, 1300. 

Ayenbite, 1340. 



Translations of 

French Romances, 
1250-1350. 

Nicholas of Guild- 
ford's The Owl and 
the Nightingale. 

Song of Horn. 

Havelok the Dane, 
1270-1280. 

Guy of Warwick. 

Floris and Blanche- 
fleur. 

King Alexander . 

Richard Cceur de 
Lion. 

Sir Gawayne and the 
Green Knight, c. 
1360. 

Geste Historyal of 
the Destruction of 
Troy, 1360, 
and many others. 



104 



CHAPTER IX 

THE AGE OF CHAUCER (l) 

1350-14OO 
I. Chaucer's England 

Authorities. Browne's Chaucer s England, which un- 
fortunately is now out of print, is of great value to the 
student of the era, as is also Jusserand, Piers Plowman. 
Green, Shorter History ■; Warburton, Edward III. and 
Gairdner, Houses of Lancaster and York in the Epoch 
Series ; Morley, English Writers, Vols. iii. and iv. ; Ten 
Brink, Vols. i. and ii. ; Marsh, English Language; 
Craik, English Literature and Language ; and Morris 
and Skeat, Specimens, Part ii., 1 298-1 393, are invaluable 
aids. For a more complete bibliography, see Skeat, 
Piers the Plowman, Clarendon Press Ed., p. xlviii., and 
Welsh, English Masterpiece Course. 

Union. In 1350 the people of England could look 
back to the days of William the Conqueror over a stretch 
of nearly three centuries, — as long a period as from the 
present back to the days of Elizabeth, ere a single Eng- 
lish home existed in the new world. The passions and 
the problems of that early day had faded into story and 
legend ; the distinction between Norman and Saxon had 
long ago been forgotten, but despite all this the English 
were not yet a perfectly homogeneous people. There had 
been two well-nigh insurmountable obstacles in the way 
of complete union. During a large part of the era the 
kingdom had embraced a goodly section of continental 

105 



io6 The Foundations of English Literature 

Removal of Obstacles Obstinacy of the English 

Europe, and under such conditions a united nationality 
was impossible. Nature herself had placed the barrier to 
such a union. Caesar and Swein had struggled against it 
in vain, and the successors of William were to succeed no 
better. England must work out her problem alone or 
not at all. John's fortunate loss of the French province 
removed at last this great obstacle, but it left still another 
difficulty in the way of union, — the obstinate conserva- 
tism of the English masses. A sober, industrious, un- 
educated peasantry is ever a slow-moving body ; add the 
adjective '* English " and you increase the inertia ten- 
fold. The final fusion of the two peoples was doubtless 
inevitable, but it proved to be an almost interminable 
process. The English yielded not at all; almost every 
concession came from the ruling class. They made the 
first move ; they went half way and more ; they gave up 
indeed nearly everything that was essentially their own. 
Only when the change was well-nigh complete did the 
Saxons relent. Then for a time there was a period of 
breaking and building such as no other European lan- 
guage has ever experienced. But the changes were 
largely external. The English language is to-day in 
foundation and framework strictly Anglo-Saxon, and the 
institutions and laws of the land are fundamentally Teu- 
tonic — facts which testify most eloquently to the strength 
and tenacity of the Saxon race. 

The final union of the English people and the shaping 
of their language into its ultimate form took place during 
the reign of Edward III. So sharply defined was this 
consummation that it can be definitely located within 
the limits of one generation. 

A Literary Outburst. During the thirty-two years be- 



The Age of Chaucer 107 



A Literary Outburst Causes for the Era of Chaucer 

tween 1362 and 1393 there were produced in England 
Langland's Piers the Plowman, that ear- ,35,. Langiand'sPiers 
liest voice from the downtrodden masses ; thePiowman. " a" 
WycHf's great Bible, the first complete .gJe^'^chaucer's ro- 
translation of the Book into any Teutonic maunt of the Rose. 

. r^ y /^ r • /I .• 1 1370 -1378. Wyclif's 

tongue; Cjower s Lonfessio Amantts, and Bible. 

almost the entire works of Geoffrey ^' ^387. The canter- 

_,- - 1 - - bury Tales. 

Chaucer, who ranks as one of the great 1393. Gower-s confes- 
poets of the race. Back of this opening: sioAmantis. 
date lies a dreary mass of ecclesfastical ^Tt "^auff r 
babblings and an interminable drone of Mandeviiie. 
metrical romance after French models. The French 
critic Jusserand has admirably characterized this poetry : 

The poet sleeps and his slumber is peopled by dreams. He dreams de 
omni re scibili, and it takes his whole existence to tell all he has seen ; nay 
one lifetime does not always suffice ; he dies, having been unable to write 
more than five thousand verses, and another poet must come and sleep in 
his stead, in order to finish in eighteen thousand lines the dream commenced 
forty years before. This happened to Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de 
Mean, authors of the Roman de la Rose. 

That this drowsy, chaotic field of dreams should sud- 
denly burst into full life and bloom, produce new forms 
of beauty of wonderful variety and of lasting fragrance, 
seems little short of miraculous. Why this sudden out- 
burst ? Why should the old field of English song, which 
had been lifeless for centuries, which had been stirred to 
a pale, somnolent florescence by the new breath of the 
South, have turned in a moment from death to life, from 
barrenness to almost tropic profusion ? Why, in the 
short space of a generation, should a group of masters 
have appeared who could bring order out of a Babel of 
tongues, who could lay the foundations of English prose. 



io8 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Age of Edward III. A Stormy Era 

and give the final pitch to English song ? And why, 
furthermore, after this short season of profusion should 
the field have lapsed again into barrenness to lie for a 
century and a half with naught but the dream of this 
hour of beauty ? This is the problem that faces the 
student of the beginnings of English literature. It can 
be answered only in part. It is the same problem that 
rises before the student of the golden age of Grecian art, 
that will confront us again during the days of Elizabeth. 

The Spirit of the Age. The reign of Edward III. was 
like a Northern April, full of swift changes; running 
quickly to extremes ; boisterous, now with merriment, 
now with rage ; ending at last in cold and storm, yet full 
of the promise of a glorious June. Ever since the days 
of King John there had been growing in English hearts a 
new sense of freedom. The fetters which during the long 
winter of the Middle Ages had compelled the masses to 
endure without hope of redress every form of despotic 
rule, were beginning to give way. The king no longer 
had absolute power. John had been weakened and 
humbled and his successors had been held in check. 
Suddenly it was realized that the people were the su- 
preme power in the state, that they could even push a 
bad king, like Edward II., from the throne. The Par- 
liament was gaining constantly in authority ; the people 
were thrilling more and more with a sense of power. 

But it was a stormy era. England was full of fierce 
barons eager for desperate adventure. There could be 
no peace in Britain until this last vestige of feudalism had 
been destroyed. The Scottish wars had for a time given 
vent to their fierce passions; but the victory won by 
Edward III. had exhausted this field for glory. Un- 



The Age of Chaucer 109 



Crecy and Poitiers A Time of Rapid Expansion 

doubtedly they would have fallen fiercely upon each other 
in civil strife had not Edward provoked a war with France 
which sent them shoulder to shoulder to fight for England. 
The war was maintained on a vast scale. The great 
armies led by knights were recruited 
from the English yeomanry, and after ]2: ^TZlZult 
the splendid victories of Crecy and Poi- the Scots. 
tiers, won almost entirely by the English ^^prench^crown!^'"^^ 
archers, a mighty thrill of pride shook ^340. Navai victory 
all England. The shout that arose from i3°6. Bauie of crecy. 
every quarter of the land was in the ^348, 1361, 1369. The 
English tongue and warm from English 1356. Battle of Poi- 
hearts. It shook Eng-land into such a *^^''^' 

, , , ' . - 1375. Death of Black 

union as she had never before known, prince. 

Before this era English history had been '377. Death of Ed- 

^ . -'^ ward III. 

provincial; henceforth it was to be na- 1377. Accession o. 

f i/^nal Richard II. 

^^^^^^' ^ 1381. Wat Tyler's Re- 

But military enthusiasm alone cannot voit. 
account for the new life that was puis- "'"^i.^^^l"''''''' °^ 
ing in English veins. It was in every 
realm of activity an era of enlargement. Commerce 
had begun to flourish, London was growing enormously 
in wealth, England had won her first great naval battle 
since Alfred's day and was waking to a realization of 
wherein her strength was to lie ; her ships already covered 
the seas and English sailors thronged every foreign port. 
This in itself brought an enlarged horizon. The reading 
public turned eagerly to the travels of Mandeville, the 
first secular English book to gain a wide reading. The 
new spirit was penetrating even to the lowest ranks of 
the people. A murmur from the masses increasing ever 
in volume began to rise until it filled the land. 



no The Foundations of English Literature 

Chivalry The Selfishness of Chivalry 

Chivalry. It was the high noon of EngHsh chivalry, 
that solitary blossom of the feudal system. At first it 
had promised unmixed good. It had tended to tame 
and soften the brutal warrior, to make him unselfish and 
thoughtful of others, but it had rapidly degenerated into 
pageantry and ostentation. As one reads the thrilling 
pages of Froissart, which chronicle the brave deeds of 
Edward's reign, as one witnesses the crash of knights, the 
glitter and stir of tournaments, the gallant deeds, the 
reckless heroism, and the magnificent victories, one can- 
not but glow with enthusiasm. Yet chivalry had little in 
it save its poetry. It was all on the surface ; it was but 
a cloak for grasping ambition. It widened the gulf be- 
tween the high and the low ; it had no sympathy with 
the poor, — it sacrificed them and tortured them to main- 
tain its glory. One incident alone, that of the French 
knights at Crecy who rode over and cut down their own 
foot-soldiers in order the more quickly to reach their foes 
and display their valor, is enough to show the emptiness 
and the selfishness of the system. It was supported by 
taxes that fell ultimately upon the shoulders of the 
peasantry. Such outrage could not long be borne in 
silence. The Black Death, which first visited England in 
1348, precipitated the storm. This awful visitation, which 
swept away more than one half the inhabitants of the 
island, came with especial severity upon the laboring 
classes. It upset the industrial system. Laborers could 
not be found to carry on the estates, and wages rose 
enormously. Thereupon a law was passed which bound 
the peasantry to their lords' estates. It became impos- 
sible for the working class to benefit by the new demand 
for labor, and it was this last straw that set all England 



The Age of Chaucer 1 1 1 

Need of Reform The New Language 

into the peasant revolt under Tyler and Ball. The peas- 
ants were defeated, yet in the end they gained all they 
asked. 

The Spirit of Reform was not confined to industrial and 
social circles alone. The Church was being stirred as 
well. It had become sadly corrupt. Both Langland 
and Chaucer agree in their descriptions of wanton friars, 
dishonest pardoners, and unholy priests. Earnest re- 
formers like Wyclif were speaking boldly against these 
abuses and arousing the people to think for themselves. 

Thus was the era one of intense activity. The people 
were awakening from the long sleep of the Middle Ages 
and were stirring the social, the intellectual, the moral 
life of England to its very bottom. It was the prelude 
to the greater renaissance that was to commence a century 
later, and that was to shake the last fetters from the 
human mind. 

Suggested Reading. Lanier, Boys Froissart ; Wil- 
liam Ainsworth, Merrie Engla^id ; Conan Doyle, Tlie 
White Company ; Shakespeare, Richard IL ; Southey, 
Wat Tyler. 

The New Language. We have already noted that when 
once the Anglo-Saxon tongue had begun to yield at all, 
it gave way with great rapidity. " Between 1300 and 
1350," says Marsh, " as many Latin and French words 
were introduced into the English language as in the 
whole period of more than two centuries which had 
elapsed between the Conquest and the beginning of the 
fourteenth century." When Mandeville wrote in 1356, 
English was in use everywhere as the spoken tongue, but 
it had been used very little as a literary medium. That 
he viewed it with suspicion is proved by the fact that he 



112 The Foundations of English Literature 

No Standard for English Influence of Chaucer 

wrote his great work first in Latin, then in French, and 
last of all in English. Langland and Chaucer, of all the 
prominent writers of the era, alone confined themselves 
to the vernacular, but Langland, since he wrote for the 
masses, had no alternative. That Chaucer, a child of the 
court, educated and cultured, cosmopolitan in his life, and 
withal a genius of the very first rank, should have chosen 
a rapidly shifting medium of expression, seems at first 
inexplicable, but that he did thus confine himself to the 
English tongue is wonderfully significant. Until Chau- 
cer wrote there was no standard for English ; there were 
no models, there were no masters. It is hard to realize 
to-day in how chaotic a condition the language really 
was. It needed a master to fix its changing forms, to 
sanction its new usages, and to preserve its strong old 
words. Fortunately the master was at hand. ** From 
this Babylonish confusion of speech," says Marsh, " the 
influence and example of Chaucer did more to rescue his 
native tongue than any other single cause." But he 
did more than give mere form to the language. He 
breathed into it the breath of life. 

It is true [says Lowell] that a language, as respects the uses of literature, 
is liable to a kind of syncope. No matter how complete its vocabulary may 
be, how thorough an outfit of inflections and case-endings it may have, it is 
a mere dead body without a soul until some man of genius sets its arrested 
pulses once more athrob, and shows what wealth of sweetness, scorn, per- 
suasion, and passion lay there awaiting its liberation. In this sense it is 
hardly too much to say that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native tongue 
a dialect, and left it a language. 

That the form of English spoken in the East Midland 
region should have become the language of England was 
almost inevitable. It was the tongue of London, the 
center of government, wealth, and culture. It was 



The Age of Chaucer 113 



Three Distinct Dialects William Langland 

spoken in the central province, the heart of England — 
dialects survive longest in the distant corners. It was 
situated geographically between the two other chief 
dialects. Peasants of Devonshire and of Yorkshire could 
scarce understand each other, yet both could understand 
the man from the Midlands. The great universities were 
in the middle province, and, furthermore, all the great 
writers of Chaucer's era produced their works in the 
Midland vernacular, thus making it the literary tongue. 

The literary product of the period falls into two divi- 
sions: the poetry of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer, and 
the prose of Mandeville and Wyclif. 

II. Poetry 

At the portal of modern English song stands a quaint 
figure, one of those marked characters found only in tran- 
sition eras, looking fondly into the past and hesitatingly 
into the present and the future ; clinging to the ancient 
forms yet using freely of the new; — a voice from the 
masses which embodied the English past, yet a voice full 
of the present and ringing with the prophecy of the new 
era. While all around him were repeating the strains of 
French romance Langland clung to the Anglo-Saxon 
harp, silent since the days of the singers of Maldon and 
Brunanburh, and from its ancient strings he struck the 
first notes of modern popular song. 

/. William Langland (c. ijj2-c. 14.00) 

Authorities. J usserandj Piers Plowman ; S\s.ea.tj Piers 
the Plowman, Clarendon Press Ed. ; Scudder, Social 
Ideals in English Letters, 

The facts concerning Langland 's life must be gathered 

8 



114 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Piers the Plowman A Picture of England 

from the lines of his masterwork. The most widely 
popular poet of his time, he nevertheless, so far as we 
know, provoked not a single contemporary mention. 
From scattered autobiographical fragments of his poem 
we construct a vague picture of the author: a tall, gaunt 
man — ** Long Will " — with the tonsure and the bearing 
of a minor ecclesiastic; abstracted, taciturn, striding 
down London streets without a word or a nod to the gay 
nobles and gallants, yet noting with fierce heart all of 
their vanities; a man from the people, who knew the 
homes and the life of the poor, who recognized what few 
of his day even dreamed, '* that a man *s a man for a' that," 
— a mediaeval Burns ; picking up the few pence required 
for his simple needs by singing at the funerals of the rich 
and by writing in the courts of law; a man with open 
eyes, who saw more clearly than any other of his time the 
condition of his age. 

To his masterpiece. The Vision Concerning Piers the 
Plowman^ Langland gave his entire life. He revised it 
and added to it from year to year. He poured into it, 
as did our own Whitman into Leaves of Grass, the ob- 
servations, the reflections, the philosophy, the dreams 
of his best years. It is a biography of the heart-life of 
its author and his times. As a work of art it is extremely 
faulty : it is mystical and vague, it has little coherence, it 
is as uncouth as the people for whom it was written. It 
tells no well-rounded story as do Chaucer's tales; it is a 
series of chaotic pictures, glimpses of rugged fields through 
openings in the mist. 

The poem opens, as do the Canterbury Tales, with a 
prologue which presents to us every class of English 
society : 



The Age of Chaucer 1 1 5 

Corruption of the Church A Voice of Protest 

Barons, burgesses, and bond-men also, 
I saw in this assembly, as ye shall hereafter. 
Bakers and brewers and butchers many, 
Woolen Websters and weavers of linen, 
Tailors and tinkers and toilers in markets. 
Masons and miners and many other crafts. 

He shows us the monk, the friar, the parson, the poor 
priest, the pardoner, just as we see them in Chaucer's 
procession. But it is not Langland's method to point at 
particular figures. He deals with society, Chaucer with 
the individual; he shows the forest, Chaucer the tree. 
His characters become mere symbols with which to work 
his problems, and his poem is an allegory, more and more 
mystical. The field of folks sets out to find Truth. A 
palmer, who knows the shrines of all saints, becomes the 
guide, but he leads them astray. Piers, a plowman, is 
found, who discloses the falseness of clerical leaders, and 
points out the true way himself. This, then, is the 
moral : the people seek truth ; the Church has become a 
blind guide; guidance must come from the people them- 
selves. To get the lessons of the poem one must read 
between the lines ; every page is bitter with satire, but it 
is veiled and ambiguous. To those, however, who most 
needed the lesson it was plainly in evidence. It was not 
safe in Langland's day to speak too clearly. He gives 
the picture; you must interpret. He tells the fable of 
the mice who would bell the cat, but he drives no moral 
home; his reader must guess it. " Divine ye," cries the 
author, ** for I ne dare." 

The poem is a voice of protest, a cry from the poor. 
Its pathetic pictures of oppressed poverty even now stir 
the feelings. Its influence upon the peasants was great ; 
it was an incentive to the great revolt that finally liberated 



ii6 The Foundations of English Literature 

John Gower His Attitude toward the Peasants 

the working class. It is not to be wondered at that it 
became the book of the masses, that upwards of forty- 
manuscripts of it survive, all of them unilluminated and 
plain. It was an English poem from an English pen, the 
first significant native note since the Conquest, 
Required Reading. The Prologue to Piers Plow- 
man, Morris' Ed. See also Baldwin, Famous Allegories, 

2. John Gower (c. ijjo-14.08) 

The moral Gower. — Chaucer. 

To turn from this apostle of the poor to Gower, the 
court poet of the period, is to go from the squalid hut 
into the brilliant hall. As we read the pages of Lang- 
land we see England from the standpoint of the plowman, 
— from that of the Hfe all toil, the life bowed down by 
the burden of centuries of hopeless oppression. When 
we turn to Gower's Vox Clamantis we see the same Eng- 
land from the standpoint of the aristocrat. To him the 
bitter cry of the poor beneath their heavy burden was 
but the hee-aw of a herd of asses that had refused to 
carry their rightful burdens, and that were rushing about, 
terrifying honest people, and demanding to be lodged and 
curried like horses. The maddened and desperate throng 
under Wat Tyler was to Gower a herd of unclean swine 
possessed by the devil, and their leader was a furious wild 
boar. They should be hunted down and rings put into 
their noses. He has not a word of pity; these turbulent 
masses belong to an utterly different world ; he will be in 
perfect sympathy with the torturing and maiming and 
murdering of the thousands of wretched victims after the 
revolt has failed. 

In all this, however, Gower was sincere and honest. 



The Age of Chaucer 1 1 7 

His Use of Three Languages His Influence Small 

He realized that something was radically wrong in the 
state, and he set forth courageously to find the evil. He 
meant the Vox Clamantis to be the voice of one crying in 
the social wilderness, " Make straight the ways of the 
Lord." He divided society into its three classes, repre- 
sented by the clergy, the soldiers, and the plowmen, and 
he carefully studied each of them. He found the root of 
the evil in the corruptions of the Church, and he assailed it 
as fearlessly as did Langland. His search for evils reveals 
to us the actual conditions of England in a most realistic 
way; there is no better preparation for the Canterbury 
Tales than a reading of Piers Plowman and Vox Clamantis. 

The works of Gower afford a striking illustration of the 
linguistic conditions of his time. His amatory ballads, 
his roundels a la inodey and his long philosophic poem, 
Speculum MeditantiSy now lost, were written in French, 
and his Vox Clamantis^ which was meant to be his master- 
work, was written in Latin, the only language then con- 
sidered permanent. In his old age, however, influenced 
by the great success of Chaucer, he lapsed into English, 
and amused the idle court with the interminable drone of 
the Confessio Amantis. 

Gower invented nothing and he ornamented little that 
he borrowed ; yet he was the fashionable singer of his 
generation. His influence upon later writers is inappre- 
ciable. His poems have but little value ; they are well- 
nigh unreadable to-day. The Vox Clamantis is a valuable 
document in the history of the English people, but it has 
little merit as a literary work. Over the grave of Gower 
at St. Saviour's, Southwark, rests a marble figure of the 
poet, his head upon three books of stone, symbolic per- 
haps of the heaviness of the author's three masterpieces. 



CHAPTER X 

THE AGE OF CHAUCER (ll) 
J. Geoffrey Chaucer^ ( ij^o-i/j.oo) 

The last of the trouveres. — Minto. 

Authorities, Skeat's Works of Chaucer in six volumes 
is the most scholarly and complete edition of the poet; 
the Aldine is an excellent working edition; the Globe 
is the best single-volume edition. The best edition of 
the " Prologue" and the " Knight's Tale" is Morris*, 
Clarendon Press Series. The most helpful works on the 
general subject of Chaucer are Pollard, Chaucer, Liter- 
ature Primer Series ; Browne, Chaucer s England ; 
Ten Brink, Vol. ii., Part i. ; and Lounsbury, Studies in 
Chaucer^ 3 vols., an excellent work for reference. The 
most helpful Life of Chaucer is Ward's in the English 
Men of Letters Series ; that by Nicolas prefixed to the 
Aldine edition of the poet's works is of great value. 
For a bibliography of Chaucer authorities, see Welsh, 
English Masterpiece Course. 

The wave of romantic song that had started during the 
ninth century among the troubadours of Provence, that 
had rolled northward awakening the trouveres, that had 
crossed the Channel and had swept over the ancient 
Saxon landmarks, was in the twelfth century spending its 
ebbing energies in an interminable welter of feeble imita- 
tion. Then arose, as so often happens at the close of 
periods of decadence, a master who rescued all that was 
best from the wreckage, who bound it into a unity, who 
added new elements gathered from wide fields, who 

118 



The Age of Chaucer 119 

Life of Chaucer A Man of Affairs 

poured over it the light of creative genius until the entire 
mass was transfigured, and who gave to it an impetus 
that made it the dominating power of the new era. Thus 
stands Chaucer, like Langland, on the border, — the last 
of the old, the first of the new. Langland the last of the 
scops, the first of the popular poets ; Chaucer the last of 
the trouv^res, the father of modern epic song. 

His Life, The biography of Chaucer, when stripped 
of all tradition and conjecture, reduces to a mass of dates 
and fragmentary entries in the legal and official documents 
of his time. In a legal paper dated 1380, he describes 
himself as the son of John Chaucer, vintner, of London. 
Another document establishes the fact that in 13 10 
Chaucer's grandfather had been a collector of the port of 
London. In 1386 the poet, as a witness in a court trial, 
describes himself as ** of the age of forty years and more, 
having borne arms for twenty-seven years." 

The first authentic allusion to Chaucer is dated 1357, 
when he is mentioned as a member of the household of 
Prince Lionel, the third son of Edward III. In 1360 the 
king paid sixteen pounds to France for his ransom as a 
prisoner of war. Seven years later he was granted a 
pension for services rendered and to be rendered, and 
this was continued in various forms until his death. The 
pension rolls contain constant records of the drawing of 
this pension, specifying in each case whether it was drawn 
by his own hand or by deputy, a seemingly trivial fact 
that has upset many a tradition concerning the poet's 
wanderings. From 1370 to 1380 Chaucer was sent by 
the Crown on no less than six important missions to the 
continent, three of them to Italy. The best known of 
these is that of 1372, when he negotiated a commercial 



I20 The Foundations of English Literature 

A Brief yet Satisfactory Biography His Early Writings 

treaty with Genoa, and remained abroad nearly a year. 
From 1374 to 1386 he was controller of the customs of 
the port of London, and the deed is still extant describ- 
ing the Corporation house at Aldgate which he occupied 
during this time. In 1386 he was elected to ParHament; 
in 1389 he was made clerk of the King's works at the 
palace at Westminster, and he held several other minor 
government offices during the last years of his life. He 
died February 5, 1400. 

This, then, in connection with several autobiographical 
allusions in his poems, is all that we know of Chaucer's 
life. But these few fragmentary facts are infinitely sug- 
gestive. They furnish a biography of the poet that is 
more satisfactory and complete than is that of Shake- 
speare, who lived two centuries nearer our day. They 
show us a man educated in a most briUiant court and 
moving in the highest society during all his life ; a soldier 
in a stirring and eventful age; a diplomat of rare powers; 
a man with administrative talents, sagacious in business 
transactions ; a man of the world who had traveled widely 
and who knew all of his generation worth knowing; and 
withal a most lovable personality, upon whom honors 
and gifts were showered during all his life. And all this 
in addition to his poetical skill, which is never once 
alluded to in the documents. Had it not been for his 
connection with public life we should know little more 
of Chaucer than we do of Langland. 

His Early Writings. The court of Edward HI., in 
which Chaucer was reared and educated, was the most 
brilliant in Europe. It was Parisian in its pomp and 
gayety. It resounded with the sensuous French min- 
strelsy ; troubadours and trouveres were constantly in the 



The Age of Chaucer 121 

Ditties and Glad Songs A Court Poet 

service of the King. Love was the ruHng theme ; amorous 
lays, especially that most popular of mediaeval epics, the 
Romaunt of the Rose, were the delight of the court ; life 
was a perpetual May-day. 

Amid such surroundings did the young Chaucer learn 
the poetic art. He served, we know, the full apprentice- 
ship of a trouv^re. In his youth, according to Gower, 
he filled all the land for Venus' sake with ditties and glad 
songs ; and according to Lydgate he made 

Full many a fresh ditty, 
Complantes, ballades, roundels, virelays. 

But of this early work, made up of *' many a song and 
many a lecherous lay," not a trace remains. 

It may have been in French a la mode, but it is more 
probable that like all the extant writings of the poet it 
was in the English tongue. The reasons The Romaunt of the 
for Chaucer's selection of the vernacular ^°^®- 

• • . T^ The Dethe of 

when all about him were writmg m French Biaunche the Duch- 
are hard to find. It may be that on ac- ^^^®- 

'' The Compleynte unto 

count of his humble birth he had not pite. 
sufficient command of the French f or ^^^^^"'^ ^ ^ c. 
poetic use, and that he refused to make, like Gower, bad 
French verses when he could use English with ease ; it 
may be that like all other true poets he was conscious of 
his power and sang in his own tongue because he must; 
or it may be that the court, which was leaning more and 
more toward the vernac\ilar, delighted even in the day of 
Chaucer's youth to hear one English voice amid the 
French chorus. At best we can only conjecture. 

But the early work of Chaucer is English only in exter- 
nals. Like a true courtier of the era, he was fascinated 



122 The Foundations of English Literature 



Chaucer Visits Italy Italian Influence 

by the Romance of the Rose, so much so that he must 
needs translate it, and later, when as court poet he would 
write a melancholy epic on the death of Blaunche, the 
young wife of John of Gaunt, it was the machinery and 
the spirit of this poem that furnished inspiration. Until 
his first journey to Italy, when in his thirty-second year, 
Chaucer was an English trouvere. 

The Period of Italian Influence, In 1372, when the 
young poet visited Genoa and Florence as the represen- 
tative of King Edward, all Italy was thrilling with a new 
intellectual life. Dante, with a genius unknown since 
classic times, had cast aside the mist that had so dimmed 
Dante, 1265-1321. ^^^ hoHzon of the Middle Ages, and had 
Petrarch, 1304-1375- shown the possibilities of a broader and 
Boccaccio, 13x3-1375. j.j^j^gj. intellectual life. Now, a half- 
century later, Petrarch, a lyrist like those of Grecian 
days, was pouring out a wealth of song that was to furnish 
Europe with models for centuries to come, and Boccaccio, 
half poet, half romancer, was making the standard for 
Italian prose. It was this " great Etruscan three " that 
set in motion the Early Italian Renaissance, the first 
wave of that greater renaissance which two centuries later 
was to sweep all Europe from its ancient moorings. 

The effect of Chaucer's three visits to the radiating 

The compieynte of centcrs of the new intellectual movement 

Mars. Upon his later life and work is not at first 

Lady?' ^^"^^ *° '^ sight apparent. It furnished him with 

Aneiida and Arcite fresh raw materials for his tales, but it 

Knighte's Tale). did not change the fundamentals of his 

The Pariament of ^rt. He had been too lone: in the school 

Foules. 

Boece. of the trouv^res to change his instrument 

Troiius and Criseyde. ^^ j^jg method. But the Italian influence 



The Age of Chaucer 123 

The Hous of Fame Legende of Good Women 

served to balance and to broaden the poet. It gave him 
a new ideal of literary art. It increased greatly the num- 
ber of his literary models, it opened to him a new world 
of art. Without it the Legende of Good Women and the 
Canterbury Tales might have been but brilliant variations 
of the Romaunt of the Rose. 

The works of this second period need not be dwelt 
upon, so completely are they shadowed by the poet's 
masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales. The most charming 
of them all is the Parlament of Foules, a poem full of 
the breath and joy of the springtime which it celebrates. 

The Last Period in Chaucer's literary life was opened 
by the appearance of that splendid allegory, the Hous 
of Fame. The poet had at last mastered his instru- 
m'ent; he now realized fully the extent and the nature of 
his powers, and accordingly he set out deliberately to 
make a poem that should be the crowning work of his 
life. It was no " middle flight " that he now attempted. 
So exacting were his ideals that he left all of the poetry 
of this period unfinished at his death. The Hous of 
Fame was to be an epic to do for the English what Dante 
had done for the Italian ; but he left it a splendid torso 
to execute the command of the Queen to make a poem 
celebrating the constancy and the heroism of woman. 
The work was to be almost of the nature of a penance, 
for Chaucer in many of his poems had sadly offended the 
ladies of the court by his frequent reflections upon the in- 
constancy of their sex. The Legende of TheHousofFame. 
Good Women was a noble atonement. Its The legende of Good 

W^omen. 

description of the springtime and the Treatise on the Astro- 
poet's wanderings in the meadows to be Jf^^' , . 

^ ^ The Canterbury 

near his favorite flower, the daisy; his Tales. 



124 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Canterbury Tales Chaucer's Crowning Effort 

meeting with the queen of love, who upbraids him for his 
cruel poems and commands him to write 

Of goode wymtnen, maydenes and wyves 
That weren trew in lovyng al hire lyves ; 

and finally his artless tales of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, 
and other heroines who had been constant even unto 
death, — combine to make one of the finest poems in 
Chaucer's collection. But the penance was never com- 
pleted. There were to be twenty legends, and the poet 
finished only nine. The theme of the Canterbury Tales 
had taken possession of him, and despite the Queen's 
commission, he dropped the poem, of which he was be- 
ginning to tire, to plunge with enthusiasm into what 
was to be his masterwork. 

The Canterbury Tales. (Skeat, Vols, iv., v. ; Saunders, 
Canterbury Tales}) So completely have the Canterbury 
Tales become synonymous with Chaucer that the major- 
ity of readers forget that he ever wrote anything else. 
The perfect naturalness of the Prologue, its simplicity and 
grace, its fidelity to nature, as if it had flowed spon- 
taneously like the songs of wild birds, lead one to enjoy 
it as he does the springtime flowers, without a question as 
to its evolution. But we must not lose sight of the fact 
that the work was the crowning effort of a long life whose 
leisure hours had been devoted wholly to art. Through 
all the poet's earlier work there may be traced a growing 
steadiness of hand, an enlarging conception of literary 
art, an increasing self-confidence. In the Legende of Good 
Women he attempted for the first time to define character 
and to individualize his creations; in the Prologue he 
threw away all models and drew no longer from the cast 



The Age of Chaucer 125 

Plan of the Work Its Supreme Art 

but from nature herself. His whole life had been a 
preparation for the work. The thread of prologue, when 
once it was found, could bind together things both new 
and old. The collection contains poems from every 
period of Chaucer's career. Some of his early work, like 
the tale told by the second nun, was inserted without 
change; other early creations, like The Knighte s Tale, 
were carefully remodeled. 

The plan of the work is very simple. On an April 
evening there gathers by chance at the Tabard Inn, on 
the outskirts of London, a motley company of twenty- 
nine persons, all intending to start in the morning on a 
pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at 
Canterbury, 

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke. 

For mutual safety they agree to journey together, and 
at the suggestion of the host, who volunteers to accom- 
pany them, they plan that each of them shall tell two 
stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the return 
journey; 

For trewely, confort ne mirthe is noon 
To ryde by the weye doumb as a stoon. 

The host is to act as interlocutor and judge, and upon 
their return to the Tabard the one who has told the best 
tale is to be given a supper at the common cost. 

This plan gave great freedom to the poet ; he could 
extend the series indefinitely and stop at will, and he 
could bring in any style of composition that his fancy 
might dictate. As a matter of fact, but twenty-four out 
of the projected one hundred and twenty-eight tales are 



126 The Foundations of English Literature 

All England in the Poem Personality of the Poet 

recorded by Chaucer, and on his pages the jolly company 
never reaches Canterbury at all, nor enjoys the final feast 
at the Tabard. But the work is nevertheless a unity and 
one of the glories of the English language. 

It is the first time in English poetry [says Green] that we are brought 
face to face not with characters or allegories or reminiscences of the past, 
but with living and breathing men, men distinct in temper and sentiment 
as in face or costume or mode of speech ; and with this distinctness of each 
maintained throughout the story by a thousand shades of expression and 
action. It is the first time, too, that we meet with the dramatic power 
which not only creates each character, but combines it with its fellows, 
which not only adjusts each tale or jest to the temper of the person who 
utters it, but fuses all into a poetic unity. 

It is a truly representative band that travels from Lon- 
don ^o Canterbury. All England is in it, — every class of 
society from the noble knight, the hero of fifteen mortal 
battles, to the poor plowman and the vulgar miller. 
Should all the histories of England be lost one could 
reconstruct from Chaucer's pages a living picture of the 
social life of Edward's times and the spirit of his age. 
Some things would be wanting: there is little in the 
poems concerning the martial glories of the era, or of 
the miseries of the masses; the Black Death is never 
mentioned, nor is there a word concerning the peasant 
revolt, for Chaucer was a court poet intent upon amusing 
a gentle audience, — but otherwise the picture is complete. 

His Personality and Literary Style. (Lowell, Essay 
on Chaucer ; Minto, Characteristics of English Poets ; 
Taine, English Literature.^ Few poets of any era have 
left in their works a more pleasing picture of their own 
personality than has Chaucer. As we read there comes 
to us the figure of a jovial, hearty man, intensely human, 
teeming with life and enthusiasm, wholesome and sane as 



The Age of Chaucer 127 

Powers of Observation and Description His Objectiveness 

nature herself. He is the poet of youth, of love, of the 
springtime. From every page there breathe the odors 
of May meadows, and gush the songs of the throstle and 
the lark. How charming the picture of the poet in the 
Legende of Good WomeUy hastening into the fields and 
kneeling to the daisy : 

And doun on knes anon-ryght I me sette, 
And as I koude, this fresshe flour I grette, 
Knelyng alwey, til it unclosed was, 
Upon the smale, softe, swote grass. 

The perfect naturalness and simplicity of the man is a 
continual charm. In his poems there is not a trace of 
the drone and the artificiality of Gower. We follow him 
on and on without a thought of weariness. He is '* the 
greatest story-teller of the English language," for he 
wastes not a word; his lines have the rare charm of in- 
evitableness, — we cannot conceive how they could have 
cost their maker a single struggle ; he carries us at will, 
seemingly without effort, and he has the rare power of 
giving life to his characters. As we think of the monk, 
the pardoner, the wife of Bath, the miller, they seem like 
people that we have actually known. They stand almost 
in the flesh before us, intensely English, overflowing with 
life and animal spirits. Not until Fielding's day shall we 
see again such a healthy, joyous band, such a careful 
study of the Englishman made from nature unidealized. 
Chaucer's power as a delineator came largely from his 
objectiveness. Occleve's portrait of the poet is signifi- 
cant : it represents him with pointed finger. It was 
Chaucer's mission to point out the individual and his 
distinguishing characteristics, so that others could see 



128 The Foundations of English Literature 

One of the World's Great Poets The Rise of Prose 

them. With a few strokes he completes the picture, 
and it is alive forever. 

Chaucer's place as a poet has been established for 
centuries; he is one of the four great masters who have 
used the English tongue, and his name stands high on 
the roll of the great poets of the world. His appearance 
marks in reality the birth of English literature. The 
Teutonic and the Celtic elements had at last fully 
blended, and the English race in its final form had been 
evolved. 

Required Readings. The Legende of Good Women; 
the general Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and the 
Prologues to the several tales; The Knight e' s Tale ; The 
Nonnes Priestes Tale ; The Pardoner s Tale; Longfel- 
low's sonnet, Chaucer. 

III. Prose 

The age of Chaucer is also noted for its vernacular 
prose, a literary form that had been practically unknown 
in England since the days of -^Ifric. It arose sponta- 
neously to meet the new demands of the times. Wyclif s 
'* poor priests " could get at the people through no other 
medium ; Mandeville's Travels^ the most entertaining 
work of the age, could come to the great mass of Eng- 
lishmen by no other channel. Even Chaucer made large 
use of it. Two of the Canterbury Tales, his own tale, 
curiously enough, and that of the parson, who took ad- 
vantage of his opportunity to preach a long sermon, are 
in prose, and the poet also used it for his vigorous trans- 
lation of Boethius and for his Treatise on the Astrolabe 
made during his last years for the instruction of his little 
son. In a sense, then, Chaucer may be called the father 



The Age of Chaucer 129 

John Wyclif Corrupt State of the Church 

of English prose as well as of English poetry. The title, 
however, belongs more properly to John Wyclif, who 
gave added permanency to the new tongue by translating 
into it the entire Bible. 

/. John Wyclif (c. 1324.-1384.) 

Life by Lewis Sergeant, Heroes of the Nations; 
Poole, Wyclif a7id Movements for Reform; Morley, 
Vol. V. ; Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe. 

The low ebb to which the Church had fallen has been 
already noted. Langland had written with fierce pen of 
the tendencies of the time, of pilgrims and palmers who 
went to Rome 

And hadden leave to lien all hir life after ; 

of the great crowds of hermits, 

Great loobies and long, that loath were to swink, 

that had entered orders their" ease for to have"; of 
friars and pardoners 

Preaching the people for profit of hem selve : 

Closed the gospel as hem good liked ; 

For covetise of copes ^ construed it as they would. 

Gower in his aristocratic Latin had declaimed earnestly 
against Church abuses. Chaucer, under the guise of 
playful satire, had touched the evils. He had laughed 
heartily at the worldly monk, the wanton friar, and the 
mercenary pardoner; but even as he laughed he had left 
upon his page, etched sharp and deep, a burning sense 

^ Rich clothes. 
9 



130 The Foundations of English Literature 

Wyclif 's Connection with Oxford His Reforms 

of the utter mockery of it all, of the awful deadness of 
the spiritual life. If his picture be true, ** as it assuredly 
is," says Browne, ** who can wonder that Wyclif arose in 
England, and that the echo of his footsteps did not die 
out till Luther arose in Germany ? " 

Despite the narrowness and the utter unprogressiveness 
of the universities that were filling Europe with such a 
clattering of flails upon century-old straw, it was from 
out of them, after all, that nearly all the real reformers 
of the age were to come. Oxford had already produced 
a Roger Bacon, and now she was to send forth a still 
greater character. Until middle life John Wyclif was a 
schoolman of the ordinary type. He became early noted 
for his profound scholarship; he was made master of 
Balliol College, and later he became the leading figure in 
the English Church. The details of his career need not 
be given. Suffice it to say that he set himself vigorously 
against the tide of corruption that was fast destroying the 
Church ; that he even denied the papal supremacy and 
questioned the fundamental doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion. As a result he found himself at war with the entire 
ecclesiastical body. The Pope launched five bulls against 
him ; and his own college, after carefully examining his 
writings and finding '* two hundred and sixty-seven 
opinions worthy of fire," turned him out of its halls. 
Wyclif defended himself with a vigorous fusillade of 
pamphlets, a method of warfare of his own invention, 
but he undoubtedly would have suffered violence but for 
his powerful friend, John of Gaunt. 

The greater part of Wyclif *s writings are in Latin. It 
was only during the last six or eight years of his life that 
he devoted himself to the vernacular. To combat the 



The Age of Chaucer 131 

His Poor Priests His Translation of the Bible 

evils which the wandering friars and other ecclesiastics 
were bringing upon England, he had sent out from his 
little parish at Lutterworth, where he passed his last 
years, wandering preachers, who were known as Wyclif's 
poor priests, or as Lollards. The parish priest of Chau- 
cer's Prologue, who was poor in purse 

But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk, 

is a perfect likeness of one of these holy men. They 
worked among the common people and gave, by their 
self-sacrificing and earnest preaching, a new ideal of the 
spiritual life. Within a few years they had well-nigh 
revolutionized England. For his band of workers Wyclif 
furnished sermons and tracts, written of necessity in Eng- 
lish, for use among the masses; and to facilitate the work 
he began the translation of the Bible into the vernacular 
tongue. The great reformer did not attempt the work 
single-handed. Nicholas Hereford, his disciple, translated 
the greater part of the Old Testament, and his assistant 
at Lutterworth, Thomas Purvey, thoroughly revised the 
entire work, but the impress of the master mind is upon 
every page. The poor priests distributed the book widely, 
often dealing out pages or chapters to those too poor to 
afford more. Its popularity was marvelous. Despite 
the active efforts of its enemies during a long period to 
root it utterly out of England, no less than one hundred 
and fifty manuscripts in whole or in part still remain. 
*' The Bible," says Sergeant, '' which had hitherto been 
jealously and mysteriously withheld, sank during these 
generations so deeply into the popular mind that the 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found all England 
saturated with Biblical knowledge." 



132 The Foundations of English Literature 

Influence of Wyclif 's Bible Sir John Mandeville 

Made as it was for the evangelization of the poor, 
Wyclif's Bible is written in the simple language of the 
common people. Its influence during the critical period 
of the English language was very great. Scattered 
thickly over all England, it became a model for later 
writers, and it did much to bring uniformity to the new 
tongue and to establish its vocabulary. 
Required Reading. Th.Q Books of Job y Psalms, etc.. 
Clarendon Press Series, selections. 

2. Sir John Mandeville (1300 f-ijyi ?) 

Of Sir John Mandeville we know little save what comes 
from the pages of the book that bears his name. Ac- 
cording to the opening chapter of this work, he was born 
in St. Albans. Desiring to see the Holy Land he left 
England in 1322, and the spirit of wandering being upon 
him he continued to drift from land to land during the 
next thirty years. 

He "passed thorghout Turkye, Ermonye the litylle and the grete, Tar- 
tarye, Percye, Surrye, Arabye, Egypt the high and the lowe ; through 
Lybye, Culdee, and a gret partie of Ethiope ; thorgh Amazoyne, Inde the 
lasse and the more, a gret partie ; and thorought many other iles, that 
ben abouten Inde ; where dwellen many dyverse folk, and of dyverse 
maneres and lawes, and of dyverse schappes of men." 

The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Mandeville, which 
purports to be the record of this journey, is a strange 
mixture. Its descriptions of the Holy Land bear the 
marks of genuineness, — they are evidently the work of 
an eye-witness; but when the narrative leaves the beaten 
path and wanders into regions vaguely known in the 
fifteenth century, it becomes correspondingly vague and 
increasingly marvelous. It tells with all seriousness of 



The Age of Chaucer 133 

His Voiage and Travaile Its Simple Prose Style 

a race of men having but one foot which they used as a 
sunshade, and of islands of adamant that draw irresistibly 
to themselves all ships having iron in their construction. 

But the work is no longer taken seriously as the record 
of an actual traveler. It is rather an encyclopaedia of 
travel, bringing under one cover all that was known or 
imagined during the Middle Ages concerning the world 
outside of Europe. It was translated from the French 
by an unknown author near the close of the century, and 
so skilfully was the work done that not until our own day 
was the hoax revealed. 

But whoever its author, he was the master of a simple, 
straightforward prose style. It is the prose of a man 
who, like Wyclif, is writing for the common people, who 
has a story to tell, and who tells it in a terse, unlabored 
way. It can even now be read with interest. During the 
century after its publication, it was, with the single ex- 
ception of Wyclif's Bible, the most popular book in 
England. 

Suggested Reading. Mandeville in Early Travels 
in Palestine, Bohn; Morris and Skeat's Specimens, Part ii. 
For a complete analysis of the Mandeville question, see 
Encyclopcedia Britannica. 



TABLE IV. — THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



Periods.^ 



Characteristics and Events. 



Books and 
Writers. 



Period ofFoun- 

dations. 

449-1066, 

The evolution 

of the native 

tongue. 



The period of dialects. Three of 

them prominent. 
1002. Marriage of ^thelred to 

Emma the Norman. 
1042. Edward the Confessor. Be- 
ginning of direct Norman influence. 
1066. Anglo-Saxon no longer the 

standard language. 



680. 
8th 



Northern. 

Csedmon, c 

Cynewulf, 
century. 
Southern. 

Alfred, 849-901 

^Ifric, c. 990. 



II. 

Period of Sus- 
pense. 
1066-1250. 
The native 
tongue holding 
its own against 
the French. 



Three distinct languages in England: 
Latin, the official language of 
Church and State ; French, the 
polite language of court and no- 
bility ; and English, the vulgar 
tongue spoken by the natives. 
1 1 54. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle closes, 
English works, like the Brut,contSiin 
almost no traces of French influ- 
ence ; French works, like those of 
Map, contain no trace of English. 



Layamon's Brut, 

c. 1205. 
Ormulum, c. 1215. 
Ancren Riwle, c. 

1225. 
Walter Map, d. 

1210, 



in. 

Period of 

Gradual 

Transition. 

1250-1350. 

Native tongue 

steadily gaining. 



1258. Proclamation of Henry III, 
in English. 

1 274-1 307. Edward I. " used Eng- 
lish familiarly." 

Period of French romances with 
English translations. 



Havelok the Dane, 
1270-1280. 

Robert of Glouces- 
ter's Chronicle, 
1300, 

Guy of Warwick. 



* The dates are mere approximations. 
134 



TALBE IV. — THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. — Continued. 



Periods. 


Characteristics and Events. 


Books and 
Writers. 


IV. 

Period of 
Rapid Transi- 
tion. 
1350-1400. 
Saxon and 
French blend 
into English. 


1362. Parliament first opened with 

an English speech, 
1362. Statute requiring that 

pleadings in the law courts be in 

English. 
1375. Trevisa's translation of Poly- 

chronicon — the first revival of the 

old English chronicle. 
1375. Oldest extant private records 

in English. 

1385. English rather than French 
used in the schools. 

1386. Earliest English petition to 
Parliament. 

1387. Earliest English will. 


Piers Plowman, 

1362. 
Chaucer's Dethe 

of B launc he, 

1369. 
Mandeville's Trav- 
els: 

French, 1370. 

English, c, 1400. 
Canterbury Tales, 

1373-1393. 
Wyclif's Bible, 

1380, 
Gower's Confessio 

Amantis,Q..i'2()2. 


V. 

The Begin- 
nings OF Mod- 
ern English. 

140(^1557. 
The language 
augmented, en- 
riched, and pu- 
rified. 


During this period the English lan- 
guage was firmly established. 

1413-1422. Henry V. sends ambas- 
sadors to France who could 
neither speak nor understand 
French. 

1444. Petitions and wills regularly 
in English. 

1477. Caxton's press set up in Eng- 
land. 

1488. Birth of Coverdale. 

1491. Grocyn teaches Greek at 
Oxford. 

1505. Birth of John Knox. 

15 15. Birth of Roger Ascham. 

1535. Death of Thomas More. 

1542. Death of Wyatt. 

1557. TotteVs Miscellany 


Paston Letters, 
1422-1507. 

Malory's Morte 
d' Arthur , c. 
1470. 

Caxton's Transla- 
tion of Reynard, 
1481. 

Skelton, 1460- 
1529. 

More's Utopia, 
1516. 

Tyndal's Transla- 
tion, 1525. 

Latimer's Plowers, 
1549. 



135 



TABLE v.— THE AGE OF CHAUCER, I350-I4OO. 



English Literature. 


English History. 


Foreign Litera- 
ture. 


I. Poetry. 


1327-1377. Edward III. 


Dante, 1265-1321. 


I. William Langland, 


1339. Beginnings of the 


Vita Nuova, 1307. 


c. 1332-C. 1400. 


Hundred Years' War. 


Divina Commedia, 


Piers Plowman. 


1346. Battle of Crecy. 


I307?-I32i?. 


2. John Gower, c. 133a- 


1349. First appearance 


Petrarch, 1304-1375. 


1408. 


of Black Death. 


Sonnets and Lyrics. 


Vox Clamantis (Latin). 


1356. Battle of Poi- 


Boccaccio, 1313- 


Confessio A mantis. 


tiers. 


1375. The Decam- 


3. Geoffrey Chaucer, 


1359. Chaucer taken by 


eron, 1350. 


1340-1400, 


the French. 


Petrarch Crowned 


The Parlament of 


1372. Chaucer meets 


at Rome, 1341. 


Foules. 


Petrarch. 


Giotto, Italian artist, 


Troilus and Criseyde. 


1377. Chaucer's mission 


1276-1336, 


The Hous of Fame. 


to France. 


Froissart, French 


The Legende of Good 


1377-1399- Richard II. 


Chronicler, 1337- 


Women. 


1381. Wat Tyler's Re- 


1410. 


Treatise on the Astro- 


volt. 




labe. 


1382. Suppression of 




The Canterbury Tales. 


Wyclif's poor priests. 




II. Prose. 


1384. Death of Wyclif. 
1389. Truce with 




I. John Wyclif, c. 1324 


France. 




-1384. 


1390. Chaucer clerk of 




Translation of the 


King's works. 




Bible. 


1399-1413. Henry IV. 




2. Sir John Mande- 


1399. Persecution of the 




viLLE, 13007-137 1?. 


Lollards. 




The Voiage and Trav- 






aile. 







136 



CHAPTER XI 

THE CENTURY OF DARKNESS 

I4OO-1485 

From the Death of Chaucer to the Accession of 
Henry VII 

Authorities. Gairdner, The Houses of Lancaster and 
York; The Paston Letters (Bohn), a series of private 
letters written between 1422 and 1507, throw a flood of 
light upon the manners and the spirit of the age; 
Shakespeare's Richard LI. , Henry IV. , Henry V. , Henry 
VI., and Richard HI. should be studied with care in con- 
nection with Warner, English History in Shakespeare' s 
Plays. 

In literature and in civilization generally, the century 
after the death of Chaucer was a time of almost total 
eclipse, well-nigh as dark as that which in earlier days 
had followed the era of Northumbria. Taine even calls 
it the age of pagan renaissance. With the death of 
Chaucer the new literature which had sprung up every- 
where in England with such richness and variety, and 
which had seemed but the promise of a more glorious 
future, ceased as suddenly as it had begun. A few sing- 
ers there were like Occleve and Lydgate who for a time 
feebly imitated their great master, but they were soon 
silent and the century dragged on to its close as if the 
great era of Chaucer had never been. 

The reasons for this sudden relapse are plainly evi- 

137 



138 The Foundations of English Literature 



Henry's Usurpation of the Throne Revolution Stayed 

dent. It was a century of civil war, when the nation was 
learning at a fearful price the lesson of self-control ; and 
it was an era of most narrow religious intolerance. Not 
until there is freedom of thought and freedom of con- 
science can there be a national literature. 

The Later Plantagenets. The dark days for England 
had begun even before the death of Chaucer. The early 
death of the Black Prince caused the succession to fall to 
his son, Richard II. But his reign was so full of weak- 
ness and injustice that Henry, son of John of Gaunt, 
aided by the Percies and other powerful houses, had even 
dared to rise against him. In 1399, only a few months 
before Chaucer's death, this daring young noble suc- 
ceeded in his rebellion, deposed the King, 
(Red Rose.) ' ^nd although he was not in the direct 
Henry IV., 1399-1413. ijj^g ^f succcssion, scizcd the crown under 

Henry v., -1422. r tt ttt --t-i • r 

Henry VI. ,-1461. the title of Henry iV. Ihis act of 

YORK. usurpation kept England in a tumult 

Edward'iv., 1483- ^^^ nearly a century, and precipitated the 

Edward v., 1483. quarrel between baron and baron which 

Richard III., 1485. 1 1 x. 1 4. j 

was bound to come sooner or later, and 
which eventually cleared from England the last vestiges 
of the feudal system. 

The storm soon burst with fury upon Henry, but the 
King was master of the situation and at the battle of 
Shrewsbury dealt such a blow at the great houses which 
had arisen against him that the feudal power did not 
rally again for a generation. His son, Henry V., was a 
strong, masterful man, one of the brilliant figures in 
English history. He saw clearly his position, — England 
was a powder-mill that a single spark might destroy ; and 
with cool wisdom he adopted the plan of Edward III.— 



The Century of Darkness 



Period of Inevitable Conflict Wars of the Roses 

To busy giddy minds 
With foreign quarrels. 

The briUiant campaign that culminated in the victory 
of Agincourt followed; all France was at the King's feet, 
and for a moment the old thrill of the days of Crecy 
swept over England. But it was only for a moment. 
The great King died in the midst of his triumph, and his 
son, only nine months old, was crowned in his cradle. 
The strong wills of the two Henrys had stayed the tide 
of civil discord, but now there was no hand to check it, 
for even when the young King became of age he was but 
a child. During his whole life he was a shuttlecock 
tossed between powerful factions. Little by little the 
French territory won by his father was wrested away, for 
a p^reat power, the peasant maiden, Joan , . 

° ^ ' ^ -^ 14I5- Agincourt. 

of Arc, had arisen in France. Soon there 1429. siege of Orleans, 
was but the little town of Calais to show '^'''^ ^^ -^"^^ °^ 

Arc. 

for the brilliant and costly wars of the 1455- Battle of st. 
former reign, and now the house of ^^f/.^Battie of Tow- 
York, led by the powerful baron War- ton. 
wick, who boasted that on festal days he ^'^Tewkesbury.^ 
fed thirty thousand at his table, boldly M85. Battle of Bos- 
demanded its rights, wrested from it by 
the usurper Henry IV. The Wars of the Roses followed, 
and for thirty years the island w^as a battlefield. The 
conflict so long inevitable had burst upon England with 
fury, — seldom in history does one find so savage and so 
bloody a struggle. No quarter was asked or given. 
After every battle there was a wholesale beheading, until 
almost all the nobility of the kingdom were destroyed. 
Whole houses like that of Warwick and of Somierset were 
exterminated to a man. When the Wars of the Roses 



140 The Foundations of English Literature 

Religious Repression Persecution of the Lollards 

were over, the great wreck of the feudal system that had 
cumbered and threatened the land since the days of 
Henry II. was swept entirely from English soil. 

This struggle, so fearfully cruel and bloody, was the 
last lesson in that harsh school whose first master had 
been William the Norman. It was a lesson that England 
had sooner or later to learn if she was ever to become a 
united, self-centered nation. 

Another and perhaps more important cause for the 
literary barrenness of the period was the policy of re- 
ligious repression adopted by Henry IV. and continued 
with fierceness until the middle of the century. Pro- 
tected by John of Gaunt, Wyclif had sown broadcast the 
seeds of religious and intellectual emancipation. For 
half a century England had thrilled with a new life; 
literature had flourished, originality of thought and 
opinion had been tolerated. But no sooner was the 
great Duke dead than the tide turned. In 1400 a fierce 
decree against the Lollards was enacted, and during the 
following half-century no efforts were spared to root out 
the effects of Wyclif's sowing. The colleges were 
prominent in the persecution, and as a result learning 
sank lower and lower. Since all free inquiry, all origin- 
ality, was heresy, scholarship must continue to beat at 
the old straw, and literature must be content to echo 
masters who had sung in more fortunate days. 
Suggested Reading. Drayton, Ballad of Agin- 
court (Ward, English Poets) ; Scott, The Fair Maid of 
Perth ; Bulwer, The Last of the Barons ; Southey, Joan 
of Arc, 

I. William Caxton (c. 1^1-i/j.gi) 

{Life, by William Blades, — scholarly and exhaustive ; 
Morley, vi., Ch. xiv.) 



The Century of Darkness 141 

Life of Caxton His Publications 

While the darkness of the period was most dense there 
entered England, silently and unobserved, a force that 
was destined to revolutionize the nation's intellectual 
life. The advent of Caxton with his printing press 
divides sharply the history of English literature. All be- 
fore him is the old ; all after him the new. 

Caxton was of English parentage, a native of Kent ; 
but being apprenticed to a mercer he was early taken 
abroad, and in 1450 we find him a prosperous merchant 
of Bruges. He remained in the Flemish city during the 
next twenty-five years, an active and important business 
man, kept in constant trouble by the trade relations be- 
tween England and the Low Countries. In 1468 a 
change in the treaty relieved him of much of his labor, 
and he immediately began to improve his leisure hours 
by making a translation from the French. Three years 
later he had completed an English version of Le Recueil 
des Histoires de Troye. It became exceedingly popular, 
but the old difficulty that had confronted every successful 
writer since the earliest times now arose before Caxton. 
The reduplication of manuscripts was a long and tedious 
process. He copied until his eyes were *' dimmed with 
overmuch looking on the white paper," and then he be- 
thought himself of the newly discovered art of printing 
which had just been introduced into Bruges. As a result 
his translation of the Recueil was printed in 1474, perhaps 
at Bruges, probably at Cologne, thereby winning the dis- 
tinction of being the first English book reproduced by 
movable types. Caxton was evidently charmed with his 
new accomplishment. In 1476 he took a complete print- 
ing outfit to London, and the next year he produced The 
Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers^ the first book ever 



142 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Service to the English Tongue His Love of Romance 

printed in England. From this date until 149 1 Caxton's 
press was in constant activity. He threw into his new 
work all the marvelous energy that had characterized 
him as a business man. He translated from the French 
twenty-one books, mainly romances, and issued them 
sometimes in several editions. He produced editions of 
Chaucer, Gower, Malory, and Lydgate, besides transla- 
tions from the Latin and the Dutch. ** He printed in 
fourteen years, ' * says his biographer, * * more than eighteen 
thousand pages, nearly all of folio size, and nearly eighty 
separate books." 

The service that Caxton rendered the English language 
and literature cannot be overestimated. He selected 
with a careful hand the best that English literature had 
produced, and he made it possible for it to be distributed 
widely; the author was no longer at the mercy of the 
copyist; large numbers of a work, absolutely uniform, 
could be produced, a fact that in itself did much to settle 
English speech. But Caxton did more : he was the first 
English editor; he suppHed introductory matter and in- 
sisted upon uniformity of orthography and diction. His 
own prose style, although not especially notable, is never- 
theless vigorous and idiomatic. *' He stood," says Green, 
" between two schools of translation, that of French 
affectation and English pedantry " ; and his sturdy good 
sense bade him use the strong, homely English that he 
heard all about him. 

The publications of the first printer, with their simple, 
honest introductions, throw a flood of light upon his 
character and his time. He loved romance and the old 
tales of chivalry. 

O blessed Lord [he cried] when I remembre the grete and many volumes 



The Century of Darkness 143 

Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d' Arthur 

of Seynt Graal, Ghalehot & Launcelotte de Lake, Gawayn, Perceval, Ly- 
onel, and Tristram, and many other, of whom were over longe to reherce, 
and also to me unknowen ! But thy storye of the said Arthur is so glory- 
ous and shyning that he is stalled in the fyrst place of the moost noble, 
beste and worthyest of the Cristen men. 

But Caxton was not alone in his enthusiasm. Romance 
was still the chief literary diet of those who could read, 
as it had been ever since the Normans had brought it into 
the island four centuries before. 

2. Sir Thomas Malory 

Authorities. The Globe Edition ; Sommer's Edition, 
3 vols., is the leading authority; Mead's Selections from 
Le Morte d' Arthur, with its excellent introduction, is the 
most helpful for the general student; see also Rhys', 
Studies in the Arthur Legend. 

In July, 1485, there issued from Caxton's press the 
most important work produced in England during the 
century, — Le Morte d' Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. 
The book comes suddenly before us like one of Merlin's 
creations. Of its origin and its author we know almost 
nothing. It ** was ended the ix yere of the reygne of 
King Edward the fourth [1470] by Syr Thom.as Maleore 
Knight"; a copy was delivered to Caxton, "whyche 
copye Syr Thomas Malorye dyd take oute of certeyn 
bookes of frensshe and reduced it in to Englysshe " ; 
and it was edited, furnished with preface and table of 
contents, divided into books and chapters, and printed 
by Caxton. So much we gather from the work itself. 
All attempts to supply more details and to connect the 
author with any historical personage must rest upon 
conjecture. 

But the personality of the old knight breathes from 



144 The Foundations of English Literature 

Dreams of the Middle Ages Full of the Soul of Mediaeval Life 

every page of his romance. He was a survival, a Don 
Quixote, a courtly figure, who had wandered into a de- 
generate age and whose thoughts and dreams were of the 
old days. The time was ripe for the work; no other 
century could have produced it. The generation before 
Malory had lived in the Middle Ages; the generation 
after him smiled at the pompous ideals of their grand- 
fathers. But as chivalry was passing away there came 
over it the golden light that ever is wont to envelop the 
fading system or the vanishing race, and the hand of the 
master caught it at the right moment and fixed it forever. 
All that was brightest and most romantic in chivalry 
lives and breathes on the pages of Malory. We find 
there not the life of the Middle Ages as it was actually 
lived, but the ideals and the dreams of that age trans- 
figured and made golden by four centuries of dreamers. 

It is a fairyland that the old knight lives in, peopled 
with the bravest men and the fairest women that fancy 
can create. Marvelous events come thick and fast and 
as a matter of course. Blocks descend with swords in- 
fixed which only the true may draw forth ; magic letters 
spring up conveying hidden messages ; enchanters appear 
in strange forms to reveal the future. It is true to no 
life that ever was outside of dreamland, and yet it 
breathes the very soul of mediaeval life, — its pomp and 
glitter, its superstition, its ideals and dreams, with all 
its hollowness and fantastic bigotry, its selfishness and 
cruelty, refined away. 

Malory found his materials in the French romances 
that had been accumulating since the days of Wace, but 
his work is far more than a mere translation. The vast ac- 
cumulations of Arthurian romance were a pathless chaos, 



The Century of Darkness 145 

Influence of the Morte d^ Arthur Its Charming Prose Style 

a mere heap, before Malory touched them. Episode 
after episode had been added to the legend by various 
hands, until it was an incoherent mass, inconsistent with 
itself. It was Malory's task to select from this confusion 
whatever was worthy of preservation ; to arrange it into 
a consecutive, harmonious whole, and to express it in 
clear, simple English. 

The influence of the Morte d' Arthur upon later writers 
has been conspicuous. It has been a veritable storehouse 
from which almost every great poet since Malory's day 
has copiously drawn. Nor has its influence been con- 
fined to poets. It is not too much to say that it is the 
one book written in English before Shakespeare's day, 
saving Chaucer alone, that is still widely read solely 
on its merits. Its charm lies in its golden atmosphere, 
in its perfect simplicity and crystal clearness, and in the 
absorbing interest of its episodes, which follow each other 
in breathless succession. Its style is artless and seem- 
ingly spontaneous. There are no strainings after effect, 
no labored constructions and artificial devices such as we 
find so freely in later English prose. It is condensed 
and forcible, full of quaint expressions and picturesque 
phrases. One need not read far to agree with Mead that 
its author was " the greatest master of prose before the 
revival of learning." 

Required Reading. Mead, Selections from Morte 
d' Arthur. If less is required, read books xiii. and xvii. 
Lanier's Boys' King Arthur is an excellent compilation, 
to be read if possible. 

J. The Old English Ballads 

Authorities. Professor Child's article in Johnson's 
Cyclopcedia. The earliest and most famous collection of 



146 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Old English Ballads Their Origin 

old English ballads \^ Percy s Reliques ; the most com- 
plete and scholarly is Professor Child, English and Scot- 
tish Ballads ; the best collections for the general student 
are those of Gummere (Athenaeum Press Series), and of 
Katherine Lee Bates. 

The century was not destitute of poets. Occleve, 
Lydgate, King James L , Skelton, and others were volumi- 
nous singers, but they were content either to echo their 
great master Chaucer or to drone monotonously in their 
own key. A few of the Scottish bards, like Dunbar and 
Douglas, struck original notes, but their work was not 
strong enough to change at all the current of the age. 

The only poems of the century that are still readable 
with pleasure are the quaint old ballads, like A Geste of 
Robyn Hode^ The Battle of Otter burn, Chevy Chace, and 
Nut-Brown Maid that have drifted, without name or date 
to our own times. These ballads are the lineal descend- 
ants of the old Saxon minstrelsy, — oi Beowulf diXid Judith 
and the Battle of Brunanburh. They sprang like all primi- 
tive epic poetry from the common folk, who took huge 
delight in their stirring lines. The offspring at first of 
single singers, they were passed on by tradition, receiving 
in transit many additions and changes, and they were 
sung, perhaps with instrumental accompaniment, at the 
gatherings and merrymakings of the people. Doubtless 
the most popular of all the ballads was that cycle of 
stories which gathered around the name of Robin Hood, 
whose bold, free life in the greenwood forest, whose skill 
with the long-bow and whose pluck and daring have 
made him the typical hero of English folk-lore. Perhaps 
the most spirited of the ballads and the one with the 
greatest literary merit is Chevy Chace, or its older and 



The Century of Darkness 147 

Their Force and Charm Successors of the Anglo-Saxon Poetry 

better version, The Hunting of tke Cheviot. The popu- 
larity of this poem has always been marvelous. ** Cer- 
tainly I must confess mine own barbarousness," declared 
Sir Philip Sidney; ** I never heard the old song of Percy 
and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more 
than with a trumpet ; and yet it is sung but by some 
blind Crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style." 
Ballads of the English border have continued to be made 
even to our own day. Sir Walter Scott at the beginning 
of the century collected three volumes of the Minstrelsy 
of the Scottish Border, much of which had never before 
been written down. 

The charm of the ballads lies in their simplicity and 
their unconscious art. The meter often hobbles and the 
movement is by no means uniform, yet the story is told 
with effectiveness. The stirring scene stands graphically 
before us ; the interest is sustained to the end, and the 
climax is skilfully managed. There is much in the bal- 
lads to remind one of the old Saxon poetry. There are 
the same picturesque epithets and recurring phrases ; the 
same parallel constructions and alliteration. As we read 
them there comes before us the same stalwart figure that 
we found centuries before in Beowulf. The Englishman 
of the ballads is the Englishman of the primal poetry, 
with more civilization and a larger horizon, yet at heart 
unchanged. 

Required Reading. The Hunting of the Cheviot and 
a Geste of Robyn Hode. See also Addison, Spectator, 
70-74. 

^. The Religious Drama 

Authorities. Pollard, English Miracle Plays, Moral- 
ities, and Interludes ; Ten Brink, Vol. ii. ; Symonds, 



148 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Miracle Play Its Origin 

Shakespeare' s Predecessors in the English Drama ; Bates, 
English Religious Drama ; Tolman, Bibliography of the 
English Drama before Elizabeth (University of Chicago 
Press). 

Our survey of the century would be incomplete with- 
out a consideration of the mystery or miracle play, which 
during this age reached in England its most flourishing 
stage. It was by no means a new thing; it had been 
slowly evolving for centuries, but so small is its literary 
merit that were it not that from it was developed the 
Elizabethan drama it would doubtless be overlooked. 

The germs of the miracle play must be sought for on 
the continent, in France and Germany. It seems to 
have sprung almost spontaneously from the Roman 
Catholic ritual. The great mass of the people during 
all the Middle Ages were rude and unlettered. To im- 
press upon them the solemn lessons of Christmas and 
Easter and other holy days, the Latin service was made 
as objective as possible. A crucifix was buried with im- 
pressive ceremonies on the evening of Good Friday, to be 
resurrected with joyous hymns on Easter morn. So suc- 
cessful was this device that it was gradually improved 
upon; characters were introduced, with dialogue and 
appropriate costumes, until the Easter service had become 
in all its essentials a passion play. Other festival days 
were similarly observed, and so popular did the service 
become that the Church could no longer hold the eager 
multitudes who pressed for admittance. The priests 
were forced to perform the service in the churchyard 
and later on the village green. At first only ecclesiastics 
took part, but at length laymen were admitted, and the 
play drifted farther and farther from the service until at 



The Century of Darkness 149 

Play Cycles Presentation of these Plays 

last, by order of the Pope, the priests withdrew and left 
it wholly a secular performance. 

The miracle play was brought into England by the 
Normans during the twelfth century. Its popularity was 
so immediate that by the middle of the next century it 
had spread over the entire island. In certain cities, 
notably at Chester and York, there sprang up elaborate 
play cycles, written doubtless by ecclesiastics and enacted 
once each year by actors chosen from the citizens. One 
hundred and sixty-one of these plays have been pre- 
served, and among them, by great good fortune, there 
are four complete cycles: the Chester cycle, of twenty- 
five plays, which was in continual use between the years 
1268 and 1577; the Towneley cycle, which consisted of 
thirty-two ; the Coventry, which consisted of forty-two ; 
and the York, which contained forty-eight. 

On the day chosen for the presentation of a cycle of 
plays the country for miles around was in motion; the 
city was thronged with eager multitudes. At an early 
hour the play began. A large van or platform, divided 
into two rooms, the lower to be used as a dressing-room, 
the upper as a stage, came rolling into the market-place 
in charge of one of the city guilds. After a short pro- 
logue the actors chosen from the guild of tanners be- 
gan upon the stage to enact the fall of Lucifer. The 
play at length over, the van was drawn into the next 
street to repeat the performance to a new audience, while 
its place was taken by another van in charge of the 
plasterers, whose duty it was to enact the creation of 
the world. Then came the shipwrights, w^ho repre- 
sented the building of the ark; and the fishmongers and 
mariners, who enacted the episode of the flood. Thus 



150 The Foundations of English Literature 

Their Literary Merit Small Their Influence 

one by one the vans, each in charge of its guild, rolled by, 
until the entire twenty-five plays had been presented. 
In many places the acting covered several days, and in 
one case a whole week was given over to the festivities. 

The intrinsic merit of the plays, aside from their im- 
portance as germs of the drama, is not large. They were 
written with religious rather than literary intent, and 
compared with the elaborate productions of a later day 
they seem like the crude attempts of schoolboys. But 
let no one despise the drama that can hold for more 
than three centuries an unbroken popularity. The plays 
were made with all sincerity and earnestness, and they 
accomplished to the full the object for which they were 
created. Nor are they devoid of a certain unintentional 
art, which came from the very earnestness of the author 
to drive his lesson home. Unity of action is fully ob- 
served, all of the personages and episodes being grouped 
in every case about one central act or situation. Here 
and there, notably in the Brome version of Abrahain and 
Isaac, there is a true pathos handled with dramatic skill; 
there are traces also of lyric inspiration, notably in the 
Brome play, which opens with the invocation : 

Father of heaven omnipotent, 
With all my heart to thee I call ; 

and scattered everywhere through the plays may be 
found traces of humor, rude and boisterous, yet none the 
less effective, as in Noah's Flood, where the patriarch's 
wife refuses to enter the ark. 

The influence of the miracle plays upon the rude peas- 
antry, the majority of whom had no other way of ac- 
quiring Scriptural truths, must not be overlooked. The 



The Century of Darkness 151 

They Soften and Civilize the Saxon Mind 

country boor witnessed with all reverence the scenes that 
passed before him. Biblical stories and lessons were im- 
pressed upon his slow mind with a vividness that nothing 
else could have given. The figure of the meek and lowly 
Christ, bearing with patience the insults heaped upon 
Him, and forgiving with His last breath the enemies who 
had slain Him, was made a living reality to the brutal 
Saxon ; and the spectacle softened and civilized him more 
than would centuries of mere preaching. The miracle 
play not only molded his spiritual and religious life, but 
it gave intellectual stimulus as well. All classes, the 
high and the low, took unmeasured delight in it. It wg.s 
almost their only intellectual amusement. It took the 
place of the old scop and minstrel; it was newspaper, 
novel, and theater combined, and it educated the masses 
more than can be estimated. Later, when the new im- 
pulse came, and England, awakened from the slumber of 
the Middle Ages, began to create a new and classic 
drama, it found an audience eager to receive and com- 
petent to appreciate. ^ 
Required Reading. The Brome version of Abraham 
and Isaac and the Towneley version of Noalts Flood, both 
in Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama, 
Athenaeum Press Series. 



TABLE VI. — THE AGE OF DARKNESS 


, I4OO-I485. 


English Literature. 


English History. 


Foreign. 


OccLEVE, c. 1365-C. 1450. 


1399-1413. Henry IV. 


1410. Death of 


De Regimine P r in- 


1403. Revolt of the 


Froissart. 


cipium. 


Percies. 


1415. John Huss 


Lament for Chaucer. 


1403-4. French de- 


burned. 


John Lydgate, died c. 


scents upon England. 


1420. 400 Greek 


1450. 


1405. James I. priso- 


MSS. brought to 


The Siege of Troy. 


ner in England. 


Italy. 


The Falls of Princes. 


1413-1422. Henry V. 


143 1. Birth of Vil- 


James I. of Scotland, 


141 5. Battle of Agin- 


lon. 


I 394-143 7. 


court. 


1452-1498. Savon- 


The King's Quhair. 


141 7. Henry invades 


arola. 


Caxton. c. 1422-1491. 


Normandy. 


1453. Constantino- 


Reynard the Fox, 148 1. 


1422-1461. Henry VI. 


ple taken. 


Malory. 


1428-9. Siege of Or- 


1455. Guttenburg 


Morte d' Arthur, 1470. 


leans. 


prints Mazarin Bi- 


Skelton, c. 1460-1529. 


143 1. Death of Joan 


ble. 


Colin Clout. 


of Arc. 


1469. Birth of Ma- 


Philip Sparrow. 


1450. Loss of Nor- 


chiavelli. 


Why Come ye not to 


mandy. 


1469-1492. Lorenzo 


Court? 


1455. First Battle of 


de Medici. 


Dunbar, c. 1460-c. 1530. 


St. Albans.. 


147 1. A Kempis' 


The Thistle and the 


1461. Battle of Wake- 


Imitation of 


Rose. 


field. 


Christ. 


Ballads, 


1461-1483. Edward IV. 


1474. Birth of Ari- 


The Battle of Otter- 


1461. Battle of Tow- 


osto. 


burn. 


ton. 


1483. Birth of Lu- 


Chevy Chace. 


146 1-7 1 . Warwick the 


ther. 


Nut-Brown Maid, etc. 


king-maker. 




Miracle Plays, 


1464. Edward mar- 




Chester Cycle. 


ries Lady Grey. 




York Cycle. 


147 1. Battles of Bar- 




Towneley Cycle. 


net and Tewkesbury. 




Coventry Cycle. 


1475. Edward invades 
France. 
1483-1483. Edward V. 
1483. Murder of Ed- 
ward V. 
1483-1485. Richard III. 
1485. Battle of Bos- 




\ 


worth Field. 





152 



CHAPTER XII 

THE AGE OF THE RENAISSANCE 
I485-I557 

From the Accession of Henry VII. to the Publication 
OF " Tottel's Miscellany" 

The Later Renaissance. (The standard English history 
of the period is Symonds, Renaissance in Italy ; a more 
condensed and convenient work for the general student 
is Schaff, The Renaissance. See also Mrs. Oliphant, 
The Makers of Florence, Taine, Lectures on Art, and 
Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de' Medici.) 

While England was lying thus in darkness, wasting 
its energies and starving its soul in endless civil wars, 
there was springing up in Italy — in Florence and Rome 
— a new life that was destined to spread over all Eu- 
rope. The enthusiasm of the earlier Renaissance, of the 
days of Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio, had almost 
ebbed away, but now it arose again with tenfold 
power. The immediate cause of the avv^akening was 
the renewal of contact between the Western and the 
Eastern civilizations of Europe. Early in the fifteenth 
century scholars from Byzantium had wandered to 
Italy, bringing with them the language and the mas- 
terpieces of ancient Greece. Still later, in 1453, when 
Constantinople, which for years had been the seat of 
the world's best civilization, yielded to the Turk, there 
was another migration of scholars westward. Manu- 

153 



154 The Foundations of English Literature 

Discovery of Ancient Greece The City of Florence 

scripts and art treasures from the conquered city poured 
into Italy. The effect was immediate. Greece was re- 
discovered, even as Egypt and Assyria have been in our 
own day, and the discovery caused an awakening which 
can be compared only with the revolution in natural 
science which marks the nineteenth century. A new 
world was opened before the eyes of scholars, and its 
minutest details were studied with eager interest. The 
world was ransacked for manuscripts and relics of an- 
tiquity. During the pontificate of Nicholas V. (1447-145 5) 
the Vatican library was founded, soon to become the 
most valuable collection of books since the library of 
Alexandria, Nicholas himself bought for it no less than 
five thousand rare manuscripts, and soon the number was 
greatly increased. From books the collectors turned to 
statuary and art. The great masterpieces, many of 
which, like the Laocoon group, the torso of Hercules, and 
the Apollo Belvedere, had been lost for centuries, were 
recovered and brought to the Vatican. 

The center of the new Italy was Florence, the magnifi- 
cent, ** the flower of cities." Rich and powerful families 
like the Medici poured out their wealth to adorn it, to 
make it the home of beauty and refinement, of art and 
poetry and scholarship. There could be but one result. 
Contact with the masters of ancient Greece and Rome 
brought in a new conception of human life, new ideals, 
new dreams. A joyous and eager intellectual life began 
in Florence and Italy. There arose a new school of 
poets, — Ariosto, Michel Angelo, Tasso, and the rest, 
successors of Dante and Petrarch. There sprang up all 
at once in a single generation the most marvelous group 
of painters that the world has ever seen. Italy had be- 



The Age of the Renaissance 155 

The Invention of Printing The Renaissance in England 

come a nation of scholars, of antiquari- ^ „. . 

' ^ Da Vinci, 1452-1519. 

ans; of poets, artists, enthusiasts. "The Fra Bartoiommeo, 
Italians," says Schaff, " took the place of „-fh.?A;g..o. ,475- 
the ancient Greeks, and even surpassed 1564- 
them as poets and artists. Republican oroTgion't^Ji^^^^^^^^^^ 
Florence rivaled and outshone Athens as a Raphael, 1483-1520. 
home of genius, and papal Rome excelled °"^^^^°' M93-1534. 
imperial Rome in the liberal patronage of letters and arts." 

From Italy the new humanistic movement passed on to 
Germany and Holland, where there soon arose a group 
of scholars and painters well-nigh as marvelous as those 
of Italy. The printing press, a product of Germany, was 
in itself a renaissance. It " gave wings to literature,*' 
scattering to the winds the treasures so long the exclusive 
property of the rich. By its aid the new learning quickly 
penetrated all Europe, preparing it for the mighty up- 
heaval of the Reformation and marking the dividing line 
between mediaeval and modern history. 

England. The movement came late to England. 
While all Italy was thrilling with new intellectual life, 
darkness still hung over the island like a morning fog. 
To the scholars of Florence in the days of the Medici, 
Britain was a land of barbarians, even as it had seemed 
in the early centuries as viewed from Rome. What was 
refinement to the rude North ? Were the English not 
coarse and brutal, enormous eaters and drinkers ? Had 
they not spent a century in mutual slaughter like the 
wolves that they were ? 

But with the accession of the first Tudor there dawned 
a new era. The houses of Lancaster and York had been 
nearly exterminated ; when Richard fell at Bosworth 
Field there was none to oppose the victor. With mar- 



156 The Foundations of English Literature 

Influence of Henry VII, The Oxford Reformers 

velous activity the young King proceeded to fortify him- 
self. He united the red and the white roses by wedding 
Margaret, the heiress of York; he made harmless all 
possible heirs to the throne ; he crushed with vigor two 
rebellions, the last ebbing energies of the great wars ; and 
he used Caxton's press to scatter broadcast over England 
a clear exposition of his title to the crown. He was soon 
secure, with a firmer seat upon the throne than had any 
other king since Edward HI., and, once secure, he turned 
all his energies toward the arts of peace. For a genera- 
tion England was free from war; free to build up her 
shattered industries and to repair everywhere the wreck 
caused by the century of civil strife. 

The Oxford Reformers. (Froude, Life and Letters of 
Erasmus; Seebohm, Oxford Reformers ; Bridgett, 
Life of More ; Knight, Life of Colet ; Johnson, Life of 
Linacre,) 

It was during this lull after the storm that two Ox- 
ford students, Grocyn and Linacre, returned from Italy 
bringing with them the true Renaissance spirit, to open 
at the University courses in Greek with an enthusiasm 
akin to that of Theodore and Hadrian in Anglo-Saxon 
days. Still later, in 1496, John Colet, the leading intel- 
lect of his generation, fresh from the Italy of Lorenzo de' 
Medici and Savonarola, announced a course of lectures on 
St. Paul's Epistles, to be given from the new standpoint 
of Greek scholarship. 

The effect of such a torrent in the stagnant marsh of 
scholastic Oxford can hardly be imagined. For centuries 
education had consisted of a minute study of the school- 
men, — of Duns Scotus, Aquinas, and the rest, whose 
authority was absolute. They had taken universal knowl- 



The Age of the Renaissance 157 

Condition of the English Universities Success of the Reformers 

edge as their realm, and they settled all questions, 
whether of theology, philosophy, or science, with Bible 
texts, which were interpreted apart from their context in 
the light of elaborate and fantastic commentaries of the 
older schoolmen. The letter had become everything; 
the spirit, nothing. *' Twenty doctors," says Tyndale, 
who received his early education at their hands, " ex- 
pound one text twenty ways, and with an antitheme 
[text] of half an inch some of them draw a thread of nine 
days long." The Bible had become a mere book of 
sibylline leaves, — a dead storehouse of texts. Even the 
laws of nature must yield if they clashed with the laws of 
Aquinas. Progress under such conditions was impossible. 
Before the age of freedom and discovery could begin, the 
scholastic system, which fettered all education, must be 
utterly removed, for " every discovery of science or phi- 
losophy contrary to the dicta of the schoolmen was re- 
garded as a crime," and every method of teaching not 
founded on the old system was heresy. 

It is with deep interest, then, that we watch the little 
band of humanists in Oxford. From the first they seem 
to have prospered. Eager throngs crowded the lecture- 
rooms of Colet, and the fame of his methods and his 
message went abroad over England. Brilliant young 
students from every quarter of the land caught the true 
Renaissance enthusiasm and plunged into the study of 
Greek, to them the veritable key to all truth and beauty. 
Silently the leaven spread among the best minds of the 
nation. Learned bishops and statesmen joined the 
movement; the King himself was in hearty sympathy. 
Two years after Colet's return from Italy, Oxford had 
become a center of Greek learning, so that Erasmus, the 



158 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Dutch Scholar Erasmus Trend of the New Learning 

great Dutch scholar, too poor to afford a journey to Italy, 
contented himself with a pilgrimage to England instead. 
He was delighted with the scholarly atmosphere of 
Oxford. 

With two such friends as Colet and Charnock [he cried] I would not re- 
fuse to live even in Scythia, . . I have found in Oxford so much polish 
and learning . . that now I hardly care about going to Italy at all save 
for the sake of having been there. When I hear my friend Colet it seems 
like listening to Plato himself. Who does not wonder at the wide range of 
Grocyn's knowledge ? What could be more searching, deep, and refined 
than the judgment of Linacre ? and when did nature ever mold a character 
more gentle, endearing, and happy than Thomas More's ? 

It was the magic of this little group that drew Erasmus 
again and again across the Channel, so that he belongs 
almost as much to England as to the continent. 

The Trend of the New Learning, But the new learning 
of England, unlike that of Italy, took from the very start 
a religious and political turn. It produced no poets; it 
inspired no artists. Its keynote had been struck by 
Colet, to whom Greek and the Italian culture were simply 
a means for obtaining religious truth and purity. And 
yet, despite the fact that it expended itself in religious 
controversy, and at last was lost sight of in the smudge 
that settled over the land during the days of Edward and 
Mary, it must be carefully considered, since from it came 
the England of Elizabeth. 

Its assault upon scholasticism led inevitably to a criti- 
cism of the Church, and never had the Church stood more 
in need of criticism. The corruption so graphically por- 
trayed by Langland and Chaucer a century before had 
increased with every year. Before Wyclif's day the 
Bible had been free; the Lollards had attempted to 



The Age of the Renaissance 159 

An Attack upon the Church Revival of the Lollards 

spread it broadcast among the people, and to make its 
message everywhere understood, but they had been 
cruelly repressed. " An unsuccessful revolution ends in 
tightening the chains which it ought to have broken." 
For a century the Bible had been a sealed volume save 
to those who through a long study of the schoolmen had 
won the key to the mystic book. Even more than in 
Langland's day Christianity had become a kind of fetich 
worship, — a veneration of relics, the most of them de- 
liberately manufactured by the monks ; a thing of cere- 
monies and outward form. Colet and Erasmus denounced 
in unmeasured terms the worship of relics, the efficacy of 
pilgrimages, the belief in miracles at shrines, the hollow- 
ness of mere formalism. All unconsciously they were 
spreading under the royal sanction the tenets of the 
despised Lollards. The same multitudes who, two cen- 
turies earlier, had listened with eagerness to the poor 
priests of Wyclif, now crowded the audience rooms of 
Colet and Latimer, or read the pamphlets and the trans- 
lations of Tyndale. Colet and his followers had dreamed 
of a reformation that should work from the top down- 
wards; that should touch the common people through 
the regenerated upper classes; but all unconsciously they 
aroused the people first, thus setting in motion a mighty 
power which, once started, they were powerless to control. 

The Reformation. (Perry, TJie Reformation in Eng- 
land ; Seebohm, Era of the Protestant Revolution; 
Creighton, The Tudor s and the Reformation ; Lingard's 
History of England tells the story from the Catholic point 
of view.) 

It is at this point that we come to what unquestion- 
ably is the most important event in modern history. 



i6o The Foundations of English Literature 

The Reformation External Causes 

It comes suddenly before us. As we read the Tudor 
annals, all in a moment we witness a transformation. 
A nation Catholic from its very foundation, serious 
always and very deeply religious, at the word of its king, 
seemingly through mere caprice, becomes a Protestant 
stronghold. A fierce struggle there is, a time when the 
opposing forces seem to be equal, but it is not long. 
Under Elizabeth the nation is as firmly Protestant as it 
was Catholic in the first years of her father. What was 
the secret of this great movement ? Revolutions never 
grow in a moment; the law of a king may force outward 
conformity for a time, but it can never change the heart 
of a people. 

The external causes of the Reformation are not hard 
to find. They came almost by accident. With the 
Tudors had opened the era of ** personal monarchy," 

THE TUDORS. ^^^ ^^^ °^ unchccked royal power. The 
Henry VII., 1485-1509. barons, who had curbed the throne since 
Henry VIII., -1547. the days of the Conqueror, who had 

Edward v., -1553. "^ ^ 

Mary, -1558. wrcstcd Magna Charta from. John, and 

Elizabeth, -1603. had deposed Edward 11. , were dead. 
Almost to a man they had perished in the civil wars, and 
the only check upon the king was now the common 
people, whose one weapon was insurrection, — a terrible 
engine in the early days, but one made comparatively 
harmless by the invention of ordnance, an expensive 
luxury to be had only by royalty. The first Tudor, by 
his energy and foresight, had entrenched himself beyond 
the possibility of overthrow and had then proceeded to 
do his will. His weakness was avarice. He filled his 
coffers to overflowing with treasure extorted without law 
or mercy from rich and poor. But his despotism was 



The Age of the Renaissance i6i 

Henry VIII. and the Catholic Church Tyranny of Henry 

mild compared with that of his son. No czar ever ruled 
with more absolute power than did Henry VIII. His 
wish was the law of the land, and none durst, on peril of 
his life, to demur. Enraged at the Pope, who would not 
sanction his unreasonable divorce from Catherine, he de- 
clared England free from papal jurisdiction, and an- 
nounced himself as head of the English branch of the 
Catholic Church. Though nothing could have been 
farther from the King's intention, this was the first step 
toward Protestantism. He was a zealous Catholic; he 
had written with his own hand bitter attacks upon 
Luther, and he had received from the Pope as a reward 
for his zeal the title. Defender of the Faith. But the 
first step taken in anger made others inevitable. Those 
who still recognized the Pope must be punished. The 
noblest heads in England rolled in the dust. Even Sir 
Thomas More and Bishop Fisher could not avoid the 
fury of the great despot. Nearly all the monasteries of 
England were destroyed and all ecclesiastical representa- 
tives were removed from Parliament. Calling himself a 
Catholic, Henry persecuted and crippled the Catholic 
Church as if he were a fanatical Protestant. 

But Henry's tyranny was only the external cause of 
the Reformation. Had the masses of the English people 
been Catholic at heart no amount of persecution could 
have changed the ancient Church. The Protestant up- 
rising was in reality the logical outcome of a long series 
of causes; it was the bursting out of a flame that had 
been smoldering and spreading for generations; and the 
rage of the King only precipitated what was bound to 
come sooner or later. A revolution to succeed must be 
carried by the masses. Its ideals must be on the plane 



1 62 The Foundations of English Literature 

Protestantism Appeals to the Masses Erasmus and Luther 

of their experience; must appeal powerfully to their 
sense of right and wrong. Wyclif had understood this 
thoroughly. His poor priests with their humble, sincere 
lives and their plain sermons to common people, had 
carried a spark into every hamlet of England, and but 
for vigorous-and timely action on the part of the govern- 
ment the flames of revolt would quickly have passed 
beyond control. They had been stamped out with un- , 
speakable ferocity, but in nooks and corners of the land 
there smoldered embers of the old fire. The new learn- 
ing was as revolutionary in many of its ideals as were the 
dreams of the Lollards, but its disciples studiously 
avoided the masses. They realized the condition of the 
Church as keenly as did Luther, but they would cleanse 
it by different methods. They believed that reform 
should come without violence; that the tranquil spread 
of knowledge and the gradual enlightenment of the 
human conscience would in time remedy all evils. To 
remove the more glaring abuses a Church council should 
be called. They preached against these abuses, they in- 
sisted upon an open Bible and a rational interpretation 
of it. Erasmus even declared that " the sacred Scrip- 
tures should be read by the unlearned, translated into 
their vulgar tongue." In all this they were on common 
ground with the Lollards and with Luther, and their 
work fanned the embers so long hidden in English hearts. 
But, while agreeing with Luther as to the disease, the Ox- 
ford school differed radically with him as to the remedy. 
Luther was for wrenching up violently the old religious 
system, rooted as it was by a thousand years of growth, 
and substituting for it another system, fully as arbi- 
trary, but as yet unsullied by use. ** The school of the 



The Age of the Renaissance 163 

Protestantism and the New Learning Influence of Tyndale 

new learning," says Grofts, " was too literary, too largely 
human to seek refuge in one dogma in order to refute 
another." Thus the two factions who were aiming with 
all their soul at the same object, were fighting each other 
as enemies. 

Luther, however, had from the first used the methods 
of Wyclif ; he had appealed to the people, and the new 
learning in England, while it aimed to educate first the 
ruling classes, had unconsciously taught the masses to 
comprehend more fully the ideals of the great German 
Reformer. It had opened their eyes. It had cleared 
away the century-old weeds and the people saw as they 
had never seen before. To the uneducated the evolu- 
tion into goodness preached by Erasmus was incompre- 
hensible, but they quickly understood the ** justification 
by faith" of Luther. His dogmas delighted them; it 
offered them something tangible to which they might 
cling. The new learning had thoroughly awakened the 
nation. In the words of Ten Brink, ** The religious agi- 
tation of the century had found in England its spiritual 
center." It needed but the common sense of Tyndale 
to bridge the gulf between Erasmus and Luther, and the 
rude hand of Henry VIII. to give the final shock, to set 
in motion a power that nothing could withstand. 

The Spirit of the Age, The great movement was far 
more than a mere change from one ecclesiastical basis to 
another. It opened a new world to the national view. 
More's Utopian dream of a land where the people dared 
to think for themselves, where every man might worship 
as he would, and where toleration and independence were 
the mainsprings of action, became for the first time an 
accomplished fact. It was an era of education such as 



164 The Foundations of English Literature 



Educating Effects of the Reformation A World-Shaking Revolution 

the world had never before seen. Along the whole hori- 
zon the black clouds that so long had shadowed Europe 
were breaking and scattering, and even the dullest peasant 
could not fail to realize the momentous change. The 
monasteries, which for a thousand years had been the cen- 
tral object in every English landscape, which held in their 
grasp one-fifth of the richest land of the kingdom, and 
which were regarded by the nation at large as an institu- 
tion as permanent as the throne itself, had been swept ut- 
terly away in a moment. The Roman Catholic Church, a 
system as ancient as the very government and seemingly as 
stable, had been destroyed at a word ; the King had de- 
fied the Pope and was ruling in his stead. Protestantism 
was actually making progress against the Church, en- 
trenched as it was by the workers of fourteen centuries, 
and impressed on the imagination of men as nothing else 
has been in human history, save the Empire of Rome 
itself. To the slow-thinking Englishman it was a most 
tremendous object lesson. The very foundations of the 
world seemed to be tottering. 

Every realm of human activity was being shaken to its 
center. The age of manuscript had come suddenly to an 
end with the invention of paper and the printing press; 
navigation had entered upon a new era with the mariner's 
compass; the feudal system with its castles and armor 
had become archaic with the boom of the first cannon. 
1492. Columbus. Within a single generation the New 

1497. Cabot Discovers ^^y ^ a i- ii_ r^i i_ 

North America. World was discovcred by Columbus, 

1498. Da Gama Rounds India was rcachcd by rounding Africa, 

Africa. r ^ ^ 1 

1500. The copernican the nature of the solar system was de- 
Theory. monstratcd by Copernicus, and the Ref- 

1517. The Reforma- . ^ , 1 t 1 ix/r 

tion in Germany, ormation was Opened by Luther. Men 



The Age of the Renaissance 165 

Tudor England An Era of Storm and Stress 

began to look away from their narrow 1520. Magellan Rounds 
surroundings into a broader world that the Globe. 

... . . 1521. Cortez Conquers 

Stirred their imaginations and awakened Mexico. 

their activities; they began to think for ^53i. Pi^arro subju- 

1 1 1,111,- gates Peru. 

themselves and to breathe aloud their 1541. Discovery of the 
thoughts. Science in its modern sense Mississippi. 
arose; commerce began to flourish ; daring spirits pushed 
into new lands and came back with stories that quickened 
the pulse of Europe and the world. The modern era had 
begun. 

Tudor England. (Froude, History of England ; Mo- 
berly, Early Tudors, and Creighton, Age of Elizabeth 
(Epoch Series); Bright, History of England, Yo\. ii. ; 
Gairdner, Henry F//., and Beesly, Queen Elizabeth.^ 

The century after the accession of Henry VII. was 
thus an era of swift change, of fierce struggle, of dark- 
ness and unrest. ** England lay between two worlds, one 
dead, the other powerless to be born." It was an era of 
intense mental strain. Men's hearts were ever full of 
fear; their minds were racked with religious controversy. 
There were times when no man could feel himself safe, 
when it was as dangerous to say too little as to say too 
much. There were times when the people day after day 
saw relatives and friends breathing out their lives in 
agony amid the burning fagots. There were times 
when the king was an absolute tyrant, and the most 
barefaced injustice must be suffered in silence. And 
there came a time when the land was rent into two war- 
ring nations, and its independence was openly surren- 
dered to Spain. 

But beneath the plowshare that was thus rending Eng- 
land there were germs that were destined to spring up 



1 66 The Foundations of English Literature 

Elements of Strength England Awakes 

and transform the nation. In 1510 Colet had founded at 
his own expense a school where classic Latin and Greek 
should be taught after the new methods to deserving 
boys, thus laying the foundations for " that system of 
middle-class education which before the close of the 
century had changed the very face of England." The 
very violence and despotism of the king were in the end 
to benefit the nation. The government was consolidated 
and centralized. Peace and war were now in the hands 
of the sovereign, and with his kingdom an obedient unit 
before him he could engage in international politics. 
Under the two Henrys England took a leading place 
among the nations of Europe, and she gained a new con- 
ception of her own power and destiny. She was no 
longer to be an isolated nation viewing with unconcern 
the doings of the rest of the world. It was to be her 
work to break down the ancient barriers of the Channel. 
To compete with Spain and Italy and Holland she must 
look to the sea. Whatever their faults, it was the early 
Tudors who taught England the secret of her strength, for 
they gave to the nation her first navy in the modern 
sense of the word. The discovery of America put new 
life into English mariners and opened another Age of the 
Vikings. Eager English crews were soon racing across 
the Atlantic to win new lands for their king. Commerce 
sprang up on every sea. The docks of London and Dart- 
mouth, Southampton and Hull, were thronged with ships 
laden with far-borne riches. England became a new 
being under the touch of material prosperity ; her intel- 
lectual life was broadened with the increase of her geo- 
graphical horizon. It needed but the hand of a wise and 
tolerant sovereign to make her the leader of Europe, not 



The Age of the Renaissance 167 

Novels and Poems Descriptive of the Age 

only in things material, but in intellectual and spiritual 
freedom, in literature and scholarship. 
Suggested Readings. Scott, Marmion (15 13), and 
Lady of the Lake\ Shakespeare, Henry VIII. \ Miihl- 
bach, Henry VIII. and His Court; Boker, Anne Boleyn 
(drama); Ainsworth, Windsor Castle and Tower Hill 
(1538); Mrs. Manning, Household of Sir Thomas More ; 
Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper ; Mrs. Oliphant, 
Magdalen Hepburn, 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE RENAISSANCE OF ENGLISH PROSE 

The English Tongue. At the opening of the sixteenth 
century ** the powerful old Anglo-Saxon had fairly con- 
quered all the foreign elements into its own idiom. ' ' The 
language stood substantially complete, ready for the great 
masters who so soon were to make it the medium for 
their work. As we have seen, it had not won its place 
without a struggle. " For four hundred years," says 
Sidney Lanier, " that is, in round numbers, from 670 
to 1070 — the English language was desperately striving to 
get into literature, against the sacred wishes of Latin; 
and now, when the Normans come, the tongue of Aid- 
helm and Caedmon, ^Elfred and ^Ifric and Cynewulf, 
must begin and fight again for another four hundred 
years against French." The fight was still fierce in 
Chaucer's day. Langland and Gower had represented 
the extremes ; Chaucer had taken middle ground with a 
leaning more and more towards his native tongue. With 
the destruction of the baron class the followers of Lang- 
land grew gradually in power, until when Henry VIII. 
had destroyed the monasteries, the last lurking-place 
of mediaevalism, and established the grammar schools 
conducted in the vernacular, the triumph of the language 
was complete. 

The Birth of Prose, The strength and brightness of 
the old tongue were never more manifest than at the 

168 



The Renaissance of English Prose 169 

Strength of the New Prose A Movement toward the People 

moment of its victory. It recorded its triumph in prose. 
Between the Morte d' Arthur and the King James version 
of the Bible — or between the years 1470 and 161 1 — was 
the formative era of EngHsh prose. It began with the 
vigorous and picturesque creations of men with a mes- 
sage; men who wrote from their heart and soul. Never 
before had there been such strong and vivacious English, 
never afterwards has there been such manly, idiomatic 
prose, — poured out without a thought of art. The be- 
ginnings of this vigorous prose arose from the very nature 
of the times. It was a period of plain and earnest 
preaching, made simple and clear for the ears of the 
masses. Great reformers like Cranmer and Latimer and 
Tyndale, burning with their message, gave it forth in 
words that went straight to the understanding of every 
peasant. The whole trend of the period was in the 
direction of the people. Even the enthusiasts of the 
new learning forgot their classic models when they used 
their mother tongue. " Colet," says Erasmus, " labored 
to improve his English style by the diligent perusal and 
study of Chaucer and the other old poets." Even the 
scholars yielded to the current. The learned Ascham in 
his Toxophilus, published in 1545, advised his readers 
" to speak as the common people do, to think as the 
wise men do " ; and Wilson, in his Art of Rhetoric y writ- 
ten eight years later, declared that " writers ought to 
speak as is commonly received, ... to speak 
plainly and nakedly after the common sort of men, in 
few words." The Italian Renaissance quickened in due 
time and fructified English poetry, but its effect at first 
was to emasculate the sturdy old English prose. 

The chief prose writers after Malory and before Lyly 



170 The Foundations of English Literature 

Sir Thomas More His Early Training 

and Hooker were Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, and 
William Tyndale. 

I. Sir Thomas More (1^8^-1535) 

Authorities. The Life of More by Roper, his son-in- 
law (prefixed to the Pitt Press Edition of the Utopia), is 
the basis of all subsequent biographies ; the correspond- 
ence of Erasmus adds much valuable material. The most 
recent Life is that by J. CoUer Monson. Other excellent 
authorities are Froude's and Green's histories of Eng- 
land, Bridgett, Life of More, and Seebohm, Oxford 
Reformers. For additional references, see Welsh, Eng- 
lish Masterpiece Course, 

On its political and social side the new learning centered 
about Thomas More, under-sheriff of London, royal 
ambassador to France, courtier of King Henry VHL, 
and successor of the great Wolsey as Lord Chancellor of 
England. In early life he had come in contact with 
Grocyn and Linacre, and though his father, to whom 
Greek was synonymous with heresy, had removed him 
from Oxford on the first suspicion of contagion and had 
set him to studying law, the young scholar had caught a 
full breath of the Renaissance enthusiasm. A little later 
he made the acquaintance of Colet and Erasmus and was 
soon again in the full tide of the new learning. His 
progress was marvelous. His home became at length 
the rallying-place of the new movement, — the focal point 
of English culture. But his early training in the law, 
which had been made broad and severe by his practical 
father, turned him into the tide of pubHc life, and step 
by step, almost against his will, he was led upward till he 
stood for a time the leading statesman of England. 

The picture of More left by his contemporaries is a 



The Renaissance of English Prose 171 

A Gifted and Lovable Man M ore's Utopia 

singularly fascinating one. ** He is the one genius of 
England," declared Dean Colet, and this estimate, 
warmly seconded by Erasmus, was shared by all who 
ever met him. Seldom has any age produced a nature 
more magnetic and lovable. Erasmus and Colet never 
addressed him save with endearing epithets. His jovial 
humor and his quick wit have become proverbial. He 
held his powers at instant command, and none of his gen- 
eration, not even Erasmus, could withstand him in argu- 
ment. But he was by no means a perfect character. 
Like the age in which he lived, he was a contradiction; 
the gentlest of men, he could personally superintend the 
torture of a heretic. No one was ever more genial and 
optimistic, yet beneath the jovial exterior he lived a life 
as stern and ascetic as any Carthusian. For spiritual dis- 
cipline he wore all his life long an " inner sharp shirt of 
hair," and subjected himself continually to severe pen- 
ances. No man in all that singular age, save Erasmus, 
perhaps seems to have been perfectly sane on religious 
topics. More, so far ahead of his generation at almost 
every point, lost utterly his self-control when the argu- 
ment drifted toward theology; his prose, usually so 
measured and eloquent, descends almost to the level of 
rant when he uses it for religious controversy. 

Utopia. Along social and political lines More was the 
sanest and most far-seeing of men. His Utopia, written 
in Latin and not published until after his death, stands 
as the handbook of the new learning. It is the dream 
of the Oxford reformers. Utopia (from two Greek words 
meaning No Land) is but the island of Britain; its great 
river spanned by the massive bridge is the Thames ; the 
city lying four-square upon this stream is London ; and 



172 The Foundations of English Literature 

An Idealized England Customs and Laws of Utopia 

the government and the laws and the people are those of 
England, transformed by the evolution of culture. The 
vital part of the work is the second book ; it was written 
first, and the rest was but an afterthought. Let us ex- 
amine for a moment this ideal England, that we may- 
learn the dreams of the English Renaissance. 

The government of Utopia is democratic; representa- 
tives of the people have power to elect and to depose the 
king, and the legislative branch is a constant check upon 
his actions. Absolutism and oppression of the poor are 
impossible. The Utopians have but few laws and they 
** utterlie exclude and banishe " all attorneys and ser- 
geants of the law. There is no unproductive class, for 
all must learn some useful labor and pursue it for six 
hours every day. All classes, high and low, " in their 
childhode be instructe in learninge. " And ** the better 
parte of the people, bothe men and women throughe oute 
all their whole lyffe doo bestowe in learninge those spare 
houres, which we sayde they have vacante from bodelye 
laboures." " They be taughte learninge in theire owne 
natyve tong. " Early in the morning, before the day's 
labor begins, ** a great multitude of every sort of people, 
both men and women, go to heare lectures, some one and 
some an other, as everye mans nayure is inclined." ** In 
the exercise and studie of the mind they be never wery." 

** Warre or battel as a thing very beastly, and yet to no 
kinde of beastes in so muche use as to man, they do de- 
test and abhorre. ' ' They are merciful and piteous. How 
un-English indeed is their opinion of hunting, for they 
count it ** the lowest, vyleste and moste abjecte part of 
boucherie. " " Yf the hope of slaughter and the ex- 
pectation of tearynge in peces the beaste doth please 



The Renaissance of English Prose 173 

Philosophy of the Utopians Their Education 

thee," writes More, a whole millennium ahead of his gen- 
eration, ** thou shouldest rather be moved with pitie to 
see a selye innocente hare murdered of a dogge, the weake 
of the stronger, the fearfull of the fearce, the innocente 
of the cruell and unmercyfull." And again ** they mar- 
veyle that any men be so folyshe as to have delite and 
pleasure in the doubtful glisteringe of a lytil tryffelynge 
stone, or that anye man is madde as to count himselfe 
the nobler for the smaller or fyner threde of wolle, which 
selfe same wol a shepe did ones weare. " ** By al meanes 
possible thei procure to have golde and silver among 
them in reproche and infamie." They were a tolerant 
people, ** for this is one of the auncientest lawes amonge 
them, that no man shall be blamed for resoninge in the 
maintenaunce of his owne religion," and *' they consider 
it a point of arrogant presumption to compell all other by 
violence and threateninges to agre to the same that thou 
belevest to be trew. " ** These and such like opinions," 
declares More, ** have they conceaved, partely by educa- 
tion, and partely by good litterature and learning," — and 
thus we might read on and on until the whole dream of 
the new learning stood complete before us. It is a mag- 
nificent structure. To More's century it was a castle in 
the clouds, beautiful but impossible; we of a later cen- 
tury can see that it was a prophecy. Much of it is still 
beyond us; but its wildest dreams have long ago become 
commonplace achievements. 

If the second book is the bright side, — the picture of 
what England might become, — the first book is the dark 
side, the picture of the actual England of More's day. 
Never was there a sharper contrast. It is a series of 
vivid pictures taken by flashlight in the dark corners of a 



174 The Foundations of English Literature 



A Vivid Picture of England Style and Art of the Utopia 

dark age. A quarto history of the times could make no 
clearer impression. The misery of the peasants whose 
farms had been seized for sheep pastures; the struggle 
with heavy taxes; the frightful punishments; the whole- 
sale use of the death penalty for the most trivial offenses ; 
the cruelty of the disbanded soldiery ; the corruption in 
Church and State, — all this stands out sharp and clear as 
if etched by acid. 

Consistent with his ideal that all reform should be from 
the top downward, More wrote the Utopia in Latin that 
it might not inflame the common people ; but the work 
must not be dismissed as a mere piece of Latin literature. 
It is the one document which embodies the whole of a 
great epoch in the nation's spiritual life, and though by 
mere accident it uses another medium than the national 
tongue, it is English and only English. It is reckoned 
the world over as one of the few great English classics. 
Moreover it has never traveled in Latin dress, for the 
world knows it only in its first translation, the English 
version made in 155 1 by Ralph Robinson. 

The style and literary art of the Utopia may be dis- 
cussed in spite of its Latin. The tale is told with skill. 
The author's whole energy seems to be bent on making 
real to us the ideal land of which he has heard. To 
make it clearer he brings in illustrations, seemingly un- 
premeditated, from the EngHsh life of his own day, dis- 
cussing freely its abuses, its evil laws, its national crimes. 
Only at length does it dawn upon the reader that the ap- 
plication to England is the central purpose of the book, 
and that the imaginary Utopia is but a skilful device to 
hide his design and yet at the same time to emphasize 
his lesson. The author is responsible for nothing. He 



The Renaissance of English Prose 175 

The Germ of the Modern Novel More's English Histories 

is but the hand that records the tale. He represents 
himself as opposing many of the ideals presented by the 
imaginary traveler, and he puts all the criticisms of exist- 
ing systems into other mouths than his own. The device 
gave him a wonderful freedom. Never before had one so 
near the nation's heart poured out his full soul on topics 
religious, political, and social. Besides its dramatic set- 
ting the work has other conspicuous literary merits. 
In it we find the earliest germs of the modern English 
novel. The narrative moves rapidly and naturally ; the 
characters are not puppets but living men ; the humor is 
fresh despite the lapse of centuries, and the descriptions 
are terse and vivid. An artist could fill a sketch-book 
with Utopian landscapes and portraits. 

More's English Work. More used the Latin for his 
Utopia only as a safeguard. Despite his deep scholar- 
ship, he preferred his native tongue as a literary medium. 
The volume of his English work is considerable. Be- 
sides his familiar letters, a charming series, and his con- 
troversial writings, imperious and often ill-considered, 
he was the author of two short histories: the Life of 
Richard III., an unfinished work adapted from an older 
original ; and the Life of Edward V., called by Craik "the 
first English composition that can be said to aspire to be 
more than a mere chronicle," and declared by Green, 
who only echoes Hallam, to be ** the first book in which 
what we may call modern English prose appears, written 
with purity and clearness of style and a freedom either 
from antiquated forms of expression or classical pedan- 
try." As authorities these histories have great weight, so 
competent a judge even as Hume declaring them well- 
nigh as valuable as original documents. With them the 



176 The Foundations of English Literature 



Influence of More Roger Ascham 

modern era of English historical writing may be said to 
open. 

As the chief exponent, then, of the new learning in 
England, as its mouthpiece and interpreter, and as the 
author of the earHest vernacular English history not a 
mere chronicle, More stands as the leading literary figure 
of his era. He had all the elements of literary greatness. 
Had he been born in a more happy age, had it been his 
lot to join the circle of which Shakespeare and Ben Jon- 
son were the soul, he might have become one of the 
supreme masters of our English tongue. 
Required Reading. Utopia (Pitt Press Edition), 
Book i., and the description of Utopia, and *' Of the 
Rehgions in Utopia," Book ii. 

2. Roger Ascham (151^-1586) 

Old Ascham is one of the freshest, truest spirits I have ever met with ; a 
scholar and writer, yet a genuine man. — Carlyle. 

Authorities. Arber, Edition of The Scholemaster and 
Toxophilus (English Reprints); Croft, English Litera- 
ture; Quick, Educational Reformers. Ascham 's com- 
plete works in four volumes are included in the Library 
of Old Authors. 

The attitude of the new learning toward popular educa- 
tion has already been noted. It scattered grammar 
schools over all England, and, what is more, it insisted on 
a break from ancient methods. With Colet pedagogy 
became for the first time in England a distinct and 
honored profession. The training of boys had been re- 
garded as mean and low: Colet engaged as the first 
master of St. Paul's the celebrated scholar Lily, paying 
him a salary that a courtier might envy. The methods in 



The Renaissance of English Prose 177 

Educational Reforms of Colet The New Pedagogy 

vogue had been unnatural, and hard even to the verge of 
cruelty : Colet insisted upon new text-books whose cen- 
tral aim should be simplicity and naturalness. Discipline 
had been maintained by brutal floggings: Colet ruled his 
school with gentleness and love. In the preface to the 
famous text-book known to two centuries of schoolboys 
as Lily's Latin Grammar, though in reality the inception 
and general plan of the work belonged to Colet and Eras- 
mus, Colet pours out his full heart: 

In this little book I have left many things out on purpose, considering 
the tenderness and capacity of young minds. . . . Wherefore I pray 
you all, little babes, all little children, learn gladly this little treatise and 
commend it diligently unto your memories, trusting of this beginning ye 
shall proceed and grow to perfect literature, and come at last to be great 
clerks. And lift up your little white hands for me, which prayeth for you 
to God, to whom be all honor and imperial majesty and glory. 

Such were the ideals of the new pedagogy, but their 
full import came slowly to the popular mind ; indeed, not 
until our own day have they come into general use. It 
was not, however, for lack of plain statement, for a dis- 
ciple of Colet, Roger Ascham, the last of the English 
humanists, a man who had caught his enthusiasm in the 
days when the glory of the first Italian Renaissance was 
as yet undimmed, gathered up these ideals and molded 
them into a complete and permanent system, compre- 
hensible even by the popular mind. The Scholemaster 
was the handbook of the new pedagogy. It was the 
dream of the new learning along educational lines, even 
as the Utopia had been along social and political, and as 
such it must be reckoned with as one of the great books 
of the era. 

The life of Ascham takes us into the second generation 



178 The Foundations of English Literature 

Cambridge University The St. John's Group of Scholars 

of humanists and leads to an investigation of the half- 
century following the death of Colet. Cambridge Uni- 
versity had become the intellectual center of England, 
and St. John's College, dominated by the master minds of 
John Cheke and John Redman, was the soul of Cambridge. 
Here Ascham spent his youth and young manhood. 
Everywhere in his works he extols his two masters, who 
seemed to him the fountainhead of all " excellency in 
learnyng, of godnes in liuyng, of diligence in studying, of 
councell in exhorting, of good order in all thyng, [who] 
did breed vp so many learned men in that one College of 
S. Johns, at one time, as I beleue, the whole vniuersitie of 
Louaine, in many yeares was neuer able to affourd." 
The intellectual life of England during the middle of the 
century centers about this college. The greatest service, 
however, done by the St. John's group of scholars was 
their insisting, as the earlier humanists had done, upon 
the English tongue as the literary medium. Cheke was 
steadfast in his insistence that " our own tung shold be 
written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangled with bor- 
owing of other tunges " ; and Ascham, though he recog- 
nized that the vernacular was often unrefined and harsh 
compared with the classic languages, insisted upon its 
use, even in poetry, for although hexameters " rather trot 
and hoble, than run smoothly in our English tung, yet I 
am sure, our English tung will receive carmen lambicum 
as naturally as either Greke or Latin." His own prac- 
tice attests his sincerity, for although he was the master 
scholar of his day, he wrote his best works in English 
prose, and he even made heroic attempts at English verse. 
The story of Ascham's life, like that of all other 
schoolmasters, is quickly told. He was connected with 



The Renaissance of English Prose 179 

Ascham's Scholemaster Its Object and Message 

Cambridge for nearly forty years, and the remainder of 
his long life was passed at court, chiefly as private tutor 
of Queen Elizabeth. His most important works are his 
ToxophiluSy or Lover of the Bow, a treatise on archery, 
and The Scholemaster^ not published until after his death. 
The Scholemaster. The Toxophilus is a manly book: 
** English matter, in the English tung, for English men." 
Ascham would have the old national weapon restored to 
general use that the young might be trained in the vigor- 
ous school of the old yeomen. Physical culture was to 
be the basis of all sound education ; the mediaeval idea 
** that the soul shone more brightly and purely in a thin 
and emaciated body, looking out of sunken and hollow 
eyes " was to him the acme of absurdity. Toxophilus is 
in reality an introduction to the more important work, 
The Scholemaster, whose aim it was to show the simple 
and rational laws that underlie all education. Teaching 
is a profession, he insists, more vital than almost any 
other, yet few regard it so. 

It is pitie, that commonly, more care is had, yea and that emonges verie 
wise men, to finde out rather a cunnynge man for their horse, than a cun- 
nynge man for their children. For, to the one, they will gladlie giue a 
stipend of 200 Crounes by yeare, and loth to offer to the other, 200 shil- 
linges. God, that sitteth in heauen laugheth their choice to skorne, and 
rewardeth their liberalitie as it should : for he suffereth them to haue tame 
and well ordered horse, but wilde and vnfortunate Children. 

He finds the methods of teaching deplorably at fault. 
The languages are taught, not in a natural way, but by a 
process that even the brightest pupil can scarcely com- 
prehend ; and the dull are flogged for their stupidity. 

Many scholemasters, as I have seen, when they meet 
with a hard witted scholer, they rather breake him, than 



i8o The Foundations of English Literature 

It Advocates Educational Reforms Ascham's Methods 

bowe him, rather marre him, than mend him." In his 
opinion, " loue is fitter thaen feare, ientlenes better than 
beating, to bring vp a childe rightlie in learninge. " "If 
your scholer do misse sometimes, chide not hastelie : For 
that shall both dull his witte, and discorage his diligence : 
but monish him genteHe: which shall make him, both 
willing to amende, and glad to go forward in loue and 
hope of learning." " Learninge shold be alwaise 
mingled, with honest mirthe, and cumlie exercise." He 
scores the schoolmen roundly at every turn. " They 
were always learning, and little profiting " ; " their whole 
knowledge was tied only to their tong and lips, and neuer 
ascended vp to the braine and head." Ascham would 
commence with simple exercises in the natural way, 
teaching the pupil to think for himself; leading him on 
and on by ingenious methods, which he describes at 
length, to perfect mastery. As an example of what his 
system can accomplish he points triumphantly to his 
pupil. Queen Elizabeth, who " goes beyond you all in 
excellencie of learnyng, and knowledge of divers tonges," 
and ** whose onely example, if the rest of our nobilitie 
would folow, than might England be, for learning and 
wisedome in nobilitie, a spectacle to all the world beside. " 
Truly the book contains, as Dr. Johnson well said, " the 
best advice that was ever given for the study of the 
languages." 

To enter Ascham's " little scholehouse " after having 
visited the halls of the schoolmen is like stepping from the 
dim mediaeval monastery into the full blaze of the nine- 
teenth century. Even to-day the book may be read with 
delight. Its prose is vigorous and flexible. Its author 
is deeply in earnest ; at times, as when he condemns the 



The Renaissance of English Prose i8i 

Ascham's Prose Style Lord Berners and George Cavendish 

new influences that were creeping in from Italy, he writes 
impetuously and with heat. He wanders constantly into 
wide fields, and never is he more delightful than when on 
such digressions. He never loses himself ; ever and anon 
he returns to the " little scholehouse " for a fresh start. 
** But, to cum downe, from greate men, and heir matters, 
to my litle children, and poore scholehouse againe, I 
will, God willing, go forward orderlie, as I purposed." 
His figures are most delightful; they seem to flow spon- 
taneously from his daily life. " Therefore thou, that 
shotest at perfection in the Latin tong, think not thyselfe 
wiser than Tullie was ; " and again, ** I have bene a looker 
on in the Cokpit of learning thies many yeares" ; — and 
so we might go on and on. 

This, then, was Roger Ascham, ** the strong, plain 
Englishman of Henry's day, with his love for all field 
sports and for cock-fighting, his warm generous heart, 
his tolerant spirit, his thorough scholarship, his beautiful 
penmanship: a man to be loved and honored." — Arber. 

Required Reading. Ascham, Scholemaster , Book i., 
Arber's Edition. 

Other Writers, In the seventy years between the 
Utopia and The Scholemaster a whole new school of prose 
writers had arisen. Lord Berners had made his masterly 
translation of Froissart's Chronicles, identifying himself 
so thoroughly with the spirit of the old master, and ex- 
pressing himself in such strong, simple, and idiomatic 
English that the work became well-nigh a new creation ; 
George Cavendish had written his lively and interesting 
Life of Wolsey ; and Wilson, ** our earliest academic 
critic," had put forth his Art of Rhetoric, English prose 



1 82 The Foundations of English Literature 

William Tyndale An Intensely Practical Man 

had made a strong beginning; and the EngHsh language, 
that could serve as a medium for work so finished and 
flexible, was no longer to be used with hesitation and 
misgivings. 

J. William Tyndale (1^84.-1536) 

Authorities. Deman, William Tyndale^ London, 1871 ; 
Ten Brink, English Literature ; Marsh, Lectures on the 
English Language ; Froude, History of England ; An 
Apology for Tindale, 1535, Arber's Edition. 

The representative of the new learning on its popular 
side was William Tyndale, a native of the Welsh border, 
a man from the middle classes, a latter-day Langland. 
Educated at Oxford, where he came under the influence 
of Colet, and later at Cambridge, where there still lingered 
the spell of Erasmus, he had eagerly absorbed all that 
was best in the new learning. He had delighted in 
Colet, to whom Greek was but the key to the truth in 
the Holy Scriptures, and he had translated with enthusi- 
asm the Enchiridion of Erasmus, that handbook of 
handbooks for earnest men, and ** in the school of the 
great Dutchman," says Ten Brink, ** he became ripe for 
Luther's doctrine. Owing to the preeminently practical 
bent of his mind, he was less clearly conscious of the 
differences that existed between these two teachers, than 
he was of the principles upon which they agreed." He 
rejected utterly the dreams of the new learning. More 
would raise his generation to higher levels by pointing to 
an ideal world in the clouds; Erasmus would lift it up by 
sheer intellectual culture; Tyndale, with sturdy common 
sense, would accomplish it by turning to a world of which 
Erasmus and More knew nothing. Like Langland two 
centuries before, he saw the heart of the difficulty : who- 



The Renaissance of English Prose 183 

He Recognizes the English Masses Tyndale and More 

ever would touch England must touch the common 
people. Their cries were ever in his ears, and to him 
they came as the very voice of God. The masses — poor, 
ignorant, oppressed — must be enlightened ; they must 
have the truth, and what fountain of truth was there but 
the Holy Scriptures ? His resolution was quickly made. 
" If God spare my life,*' he declared to a learned prelate, 
" ere many years I will cause a boy that drivest the plow 
shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost. ' ' From 
that moment, though exiled forever from the land of his 
birth, hunted from city to city, and threatened every 
day of his life with imminent torture and death, he held 
inflexibly to his great purpose, nor did the bitter hate of 
Henry and Wolsey and More overtake him till his work 
was well-nigh done. 

The first part of Tyndale's Bible was published at 
Worms in 1525, and other parts followed from time to 
time. They were brought secretly in great quantities 
into England, where they raised a tempest of opposition. 
Sir Thomas More launched against them seven volumes 
of controversy. " Our Saviour will say to Tyndale," he 
cried, " ' Thou art accursed, Tyndale ; the son of the devil ; 
for neither flesh nor blood hath taught thee these heresies 
but thine own father, the devil, that is in Hell.' " Mild, 
gentle Thomas More! Tyndale on his side kept up a 
vigorous warfare. In his answer to More, in his doctri- 
nal treatises, in his introductions to different portions of 
the Scriptures, and in his expositions and notes, he made 
his position perfectly clear, and his works, in spite of op- 
position and denunciation, in spite of wholesale burnings, 
spread rapidly over England. The common people 
bought them eagerly and read them as the very words 



184 The Foundations of English Literature 



Influence of Tyndale's Bible It Colors all Subsequent English Prose 

of God. Opposition only fanned the flames; soon noth- 
ing could stay their headlong fury. 

Tyndale's Bible, aside from its influence upon the 
nation's spiritual life, is still one of the most notable 
books in the whole range of English literature. Wyclif's 
translation was from the Vulgate, and it was not printed 
until our own century ; Tyndale made his translation of 
the New Testament from the Greek text of Erasmus, 
thus making the first English version from the original. 
From the very first it was circulated over all England in 
countless editions. 

Tyndale's translation of the New Testament [says Marsh in an oft-quoted 
passage] is the most important philological monument of the first half of 
the sixteenth century, perhaps I should say of the whole period between 
Chaucer and Shakespeare, both as a historical relic and as having more 
than anything else contributed to shape and fix the sacred dialect, and 
establish the form which the Bible must permanently assume in an English 
dress. The best features of the translation of 1611 are derived from the 
version of Tyndale, and thus that remarkable work has exerted, directly 
and indirectly, a more powerful influence on the English language than any 
other single production between the ages of Richard II. and Queen 
Elizabeth. 

And Edmund Gosse well declares that 

the introduction into every English household of the Bible, translated into 
prose of this fluid, vivid period, is, after all, by far the most important 
literary fact of the reign of Henry VIII. It colored the entire complexion 
of subsequent English prose, and set up a kind of typical harmony in the 
construction and arrangement of sentences. 

To show how closely the King James version followed 
the earlier translation, let us examine Tyndale's rendering 
of the Lord's Prayer: 

Cure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name. Let thy king- 
dom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as hit ys in heven. Geve 



The Renaissance of English Prose 185 

Hugh Latimer His Originality and Popularity 

vs this daye cure dayly breade. And forgeve vs oure treaspases, even as 
we forgeve them which treaspas vs. Leede vs not into temptacion, but 
delyvre vs from yvell. Amen. 

While Tyndale was thus struggling in exile and danger 
to make a Bible for his people, other reformers were 
laboring as earnestly at home, and the most eloquent and 
fearless of them all was HUGH Latimer, a man who had 
struggled from the little farm where his father ** had 
walk for a hundred shepe, and his mother mylked xxx 
kyne," to the position of Bishop of Worcester and 
preacher to the king. His success had come from his 
fearlessness that hesitated not a moment to speak all that 
was in his heart, were it even to the king himself; and 
from his brilliant though homely style of preaching. He 
was as quick and witty as Thomas More himself; he saw 
the humor of things, and he dared to draw illustrations 
from the homely life about him. He was startlingly 
original: there is a constant element of surprise in his 
words. " Who is the most diligentest bishop and pre- 
late in all England," he demanded in one of his sermons 
before King Edward, '* that passeth all the rest in doing 
his office ? I can tell you, for I know him who it is ; I 
know him well. It is the Devil. He is the most diligent 
preacher of all other; he is never out of his diocese; he 
is never from his cure ; ye shall never find him unoccupied ; 
call for him when you will, he is ever at home." Such 
preaching caught the multitude; the manly, courageous 
tone of the speaker, his intense earnestness, and his 
solemn message straight from the heart made a most 
powerful impression. 

Much of the prose of the era was thus simple and 
strong. Its writers were terribly in earnest. 



1 86 The Foundations of English Literature 



Earnestness of the Prose Writers Progress of English Prose 

They are entirely occupied [says Crofts] with what they are going to say : 
they are filled with ideas that are new and striking to them, and which they 
pour out garrulously and diffusely : they have no conception of the selection 
and arrangement of thought with a view to bringing out a point : still less 
have they the idea of studying the proportion of thoughts and the harmony 
of words with a view to style. Only very faintly can be perceived in their 
works the beginnings of that self-control and self-criticism in thought and 
style which mark the great thinker and artist. This is one of the last gifts 
of culture. The Renaissance had to give first an impetus to thought by 
stimulating interest in the ideas of others, before it could influence in the 
direction of study of expression, and could lastly encourage that harmony 
of thought and expression which makes art. The works of the new learn- 
ing mark the first phase, the works of the Euphuists and the courtly Makers 
the second, and the last includes the productions of the most glorious 
Elizabethan period, its poems, its dramas, its beginnings of fine prose 
writing in the works of Hooker and Bacon, 

Required Reading. Tyndale's Eighth Chapter of 
Matthew, in Marsh, Origin and History of the English 
Language ; selections from Tyndale in Craik, English 
Prose ; Latimer, The Ploughers, Arber's Edition; selec- 
tions from Latimer in Craik, English Prose, 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE DAWN OF LYRIC POETRY 

1557-1579 

From " Tottel's Miscellany " to the ** Shepheardes 
Calender" 

THE first-fruits of the Renaissance in Italy had been a 
quick awakening of the spirit of art, a new birth in 
painting and poetry, in architecture and sculpture, in the 
domain of mere beauty. The English Renaissance had 
worked along far different lines. The message from the 
East, which the quick Latin mind had received at a flash, 
came slowly to the Teuton. He must measure it by the 
standards of practical value, and he must look carefully 
to its bearings upon his religion. In both respects it 
brought to him new light, and he stopped to question it 
no more. Grocyn and Linacre and Colet could live for 
months and years in the glorious Italy of Lorenzo the 
Magnificent, of Raphael and Michel Angelo, of Tasso 
and Ariosto, and go home without a thought of art, of 
poetry, of beauty — radiant only with the dream of a new 
religion, of a new method of Scripture interpretation; 
and the new learning could voice itself only in prose, — a 
new prose it is true, enlarged, enriched, revivified, but 
yet prose. English poetry still droned on as it had done 
during all the years since Chaucer laid down his pen; a 
touch of true poetry there was in the homes of the peas- 

187 



1 88 The Foundations of English Literature 

English Poetry Drones On A Sudden Change 

ants, where the homely old ballads, survivals of the Anglo- 
Saxon minstrelsy, were still making, but in court and hall 
mediaeval tradition held full sway. 

As one wanders through the dreary verse of the era, 
all of it modeled after obsolete French forms or after the 
ancient Chaucer, — for two centuries the only English 
classic ; as one drives himself through the great mass of 
** droning narratives and worn-out rhymes " ; through the 
two volumes of Skelton, — wild and erratic, a startling 
variation and yet but a variation; through the " inane 
repetition of Hawes," and the more original settings 
of the Scottish poets, he comes to a time when sud- 
denly without warning the whole chorus changes. In- 
stead of the mediaeval epic of six thousand lines, there 
comes all at once the lyric of passion, short and intense; 
instead of the threadbare verse-forms, — the Chaucerian 
measures or the Skeltonian variations, — there comes as 
by magic a flood of Itahan and French forms : the sonnet, 
terza rima, the rondeau, and blank verse. It seems like 
a revolution. From the moment that Wyatt and Surrey 
struck the new key, all the gay ones of England were 
tripping to the Italian music: the era of modern lyric 
poetry had opened in England. 

The Reasons for the Sudden Change rest largely on con- 
jecture. The new education, the rise of the grammar 
schools, had stirred up all classes. Noblemen became 
anxious about the education of their sons, and the fashion 
of sending them abroad for the finishing touches was re- 
vived. It became the custom for all university graduates 
who could afford the expense to complete their education 
on the continent. It is certain that before the middle of 
the century many educated Englishmen were wandering 



The Dawn of Lyric Poetry 189 

Influence of Italy Totter s Miscellany 

into Italy and, unlike Colet and his school, were becom- 
ing enamored of its gay and brilliant life. Old Ascham 
in The Scholemaster sounds a note of warning. " I am 
affraide," he sighs, ** that ouer many of our travelers into 
Italic, do not eschewe the way to Circes Court." There 
was a new influx of Italian literature. Every shop in 
London, according to Ascham, was full of " bookes, of 
late translated out of Italian into English. ' ' The younger 
educated class was becoming Italianated, and the change 
was not at all for the better. Young men came home 
from Italy despisers of religion, of morals, of the true 
spirit of learning. "An Italianated Englishman," cried 
the old schoolmaster, " is the devil incarnate . 
They mock the Pope: they raile on Luther: They like 
none but only themselves." 

TotteV s Miscellany. With this band of gay young 
worldlings, children of a most brilliant and dissolute 
court, did the new prosody come into England. 

In the latter end of Henry the Eighth's reign [writes Puttenham in his 
Art of English Poesy, 1589 (Arber's English Reprints)] sprung up a new 
company of Courtly Makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and 
Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who having travelled into 
Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Ital- 
ian poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and 
Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar 
poesie. 

The new school touched only a handful compared with 
the great mass of the people, but it changed in a twink- 
ling the music in court circles, and it influenced in time 
the poetic pitch of the entire nation. At first the poetry 
was anonymous. " The poets of that age," remarks 
Edward Arber, " wrote for their own delectation and for 



iQO The Foundations of English Literature 

The First English Anthology Sir Thomas Wyatt 

that of their friends, and not for the general public. 
They generally had the greatest aversion to their works 
appearing in print." The new movement was at first, 
therefore, extremely restricted, but in 1557, after the 
death of Wyatt and Surrey, there was published by 
Richard Tottel, under the title, Songes and Sonettes 
written by the right Honourable Lorde Henry Howard, 
Late Earle of Surrey, and other, a collection of the best 
work, not only of Surrey, but of Wyatt and Grimald and 
other leaders of the new school. This was the first Eng- 
lish anthology, and it stands as a milestone in the history 
of English poetry. " To haue wel written in verse, yea 
and in small parcelles deserueth great praise," wrote 
Tottel in his address to the reader, and ** our tong is able 
in that kynde to do as praiseworthy as ye rest." Little 
did he dream that his little collection was to mark an 
epoch; that English poetry " in small parcelles" — lyric 
poetry — was soon to be reckoned as one of the glories of 
his native tongue. 

/. Sir Thomas Wyatt (i 503-1 54.2) 

Authorities. Simonds, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his 
Poems; Tottel' s Miscellany, Arh^vs Edition; Ten Brink, 
Vol. ii.. Part i. ; Wy at f s Poetical Works, Aldine Edition. 
The Riverside Edition in the British Poets Series is prac- 
tically a reprint of the Aldine. 

The life of Sir Thomas Wyatt takes us into the gay 
court of Henry VIII. ; into the very heart of the nation's 
life during a most vital era. In him we have the typical 
nobleman of the time. Educated at St. John's College, 
Cambridge, and at Paris, where, Laertes-like, he finished 
his school career; enrolled at an early age in the gorgeous 



The Dawn of Lyric Poetry 191 

A Typical Life His Many Adventures 

throng that fluttered about the great King; entered at 
length upon a career full of quick changes : now rich in 
the King's favor, — laughing with him, bandying witti- 
cisms and epigrams, — now under the royal frown, in immi- 
nent danger of the axe; now the pet of the court ladies, 
writing sonnets and love songs to Anne Boleyn; now 
marshal in France, living the rough life of the soldier; 
now sharing richly in the plunder of the broken mon- 
asteries ; now starving in the Tower, — such was the life of 
most nobles in Henry's day. 

The records of Wyatt's life are fragmentary, but they 
are sufficient to give us a full picture of the man : tall and 
sturdy, full of manly beauty and grace, quick of wit, — the 
soul of every gathering, — generous and hearty, in youth 
impulsive even to recklessness, plunging headlong into 
every wild adventure that had in it a spice of danger or a 
promise of applause ; performing feats of arms in tourney 
before the King; quelling, at the head of the royal 
troops, insurrection against the throne ; captured in Italy 
by Spaniards, and held for ransom, and then, with reck- 
less daring, making his escape; flinging himself, while 
ambassador to Spain, into the very jaws of the Inquisi- 
tion, and escaping almost by miracle ; charged with 
treason when such a charge was in itself equivalent to 
death, ignorant of the specific complaints against him, 
permitted neither to call witnesses and counsel nor to 
cross-examine his accusers, yet in a single speech utterly 
confounding his enemies ; and at last dying of fever caused 
by riding too impetuously at the King's bidding, — such 
was Thomas Wyatt as revealed to us by the fragments of 
his biography. 

When we turn to his written work we find another 



192 The Foundations of English Literature 

An Honest, Sincere Man A Linguist and Cosmopolitan 

phase of his character. Though the child of a most cor- 
rupt court, a polished and politic man of the world, wise 
enough to steer between the policy of Cromwell and the 
caprice of the King, he was yet an honest and sincere 
man. No one can read his defense, which was poured 
from a full heart, his poems, which are free from every 
trace of indelicacy, or his letters to his son, *' which de- 
serve to be inscribed in letters of gold in a conspicuous 
part of every place of instruction for youth in the world, ' ' 
without a hearty liking for the man and a conviction that 
at heart he was pure and true. 

Few men have seen more of their age. He was sent 
repeatedly by the King into all the important courts of 
Europe to keep close watch of measures and men, and 
he became the best informed man in all England on con- 
tinental affairs. He knew intimately the languages of 
Italy and Spain and France ; he had come in contact with 
the Renaissance spirit in all its phases ; and he had read 
thoroughly the new literature that was awakening every- 
where in the Romance world. It is not strange that a 
cosmopolitan so polished should realize keenly the artistic 
needs of his native land and should attempt to do in his 
own vernacular tongue what Italy and France and Spain 
were doing so nobly in theirs. 

Wyatt holds his place among the English poets, not so 
much from the intrinsic merit of his verse, as from the fact 
that he was the earliest pioneer in a most wonderful 
region. His creative power was small; his range of sub- 
jects was narrow indeed ; his sense of rhythm and his ear 
for rhyme were almost gross. From first to last his songs 
are echoes and transcripts of Petrarch and the French 
singers. He affected the Italian poetic fashion. Roman- 



The Dawn of Lyric Poetry 193 

Characteristics of His Poetry His Defects and His Beauties 

tic love had become a disease, and it was the task of the 
poet to analyze with minuteness all its thousand symp- 
toms and effects. Never before and never since has 
poetry been so full of ** flaming sighs that boil/* of 
" smoking tears," of stony-hearted maidens, of lovers 
slowly dying of love. ** I die, I die," sobs the poet, 
** and you regard it not." But in Petrarch's minute 
studies of the love malady there is a daintiness, an ex- 
quisiteness of workmanship, a sweet charm, that can be 
expressed only by the adjective " Petrarchian," and this 
rare quality Wyatt seldom caught. He wrote carelessly, 
— it seems as if he had thrown to us the first draft of 
his song, rough and unfinished, and had turned with 
vigor to his next task; for there is more than mere lack 
of ear and skill in his work. What a wrenching of words, 
what a clashing of rhymes in a quartrain like this : 

Csesar, when that the traitor of Egypt 

With th' honourable head did him present, 
Covering his heart's gladness, did represent 

Plaint with his tears outward, as it is writ. 

Everywhere in Wyatt we find such work as this, and yet 
ever and anon there comes a line, a stanza, a whole lyric, 
that thrills us. How delightful in a desert of artificial 
sighs and tears to come upon such true pathos as that 
in ** Forget not yet," or " Disdain me not," or " And 
Wilt thou Leave me thus ? " or such manly lines as 
those in ** Most Wretched Heart " : 

What though that curs do fall by kind 

On him that hath the overthrow ; 
All that cannot oppress my mind ; 

For he is wretched that weens him so. 

It reminds us of Hamlet. Such lyrics came from a 



194 The Foundations of English Literature 

A Pioneer in English Poetry The Earl of Surrey 

serious, contemplative mind, prone to look at the dark 
side of life; from a man who had lived intensely and 
suffered deeply. 

We need read no farther. When we think of the glo- 
rious outburst of Elizabethan song, the halting measures 
of Wyatt seem poor indeed ; but when we compare his 
work with that which immediately preceded his, it seems 
like a burst of music from a new world. As the pioneer 
in a most barren age, as the father of the whole chorus 
of English lyrists, Wyatt is no mean figure in the history 
of our literature. 

Required Reading. ** Forget not yet," ** Disdain 
me not," " And Wilt thou Leave me thus ? " " Most 
Wretched Heart," " Blame not my Lute," Aldine Edi- 
tion of the British Poets. 

2, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-154-7) 

Authorities. Dr. Nott, Life of Surrey ; TotteV s Mis- 
cellany , Arber's Edition; Surrey s Poetical Works, Aldine 
Edition ; Minto, Characteristics of the English Poets ; 
Ten Brink, Vol. ii., 2. 

** Henry, Earl of Surrey," writes Puttenham, ** and 
Sir Thomas Wyatt, between whom I find very little dif- 
ference, I repute them for the two chief lanterns of light 
to all others that have since employed their pens upon 
English poesie." It is well-nigh certain, however, that 
Wyatt was the pioneer, and that Surrey received from 
him his first impulse. Wyatt was fourteen years the 
elder; he had become enamored of Anne Boleyn before 
Surrey was sixteen, and he had written her many a song 
and sonnet, the last of the series being " Whoso List to 
Hunt ? " with its significant lines: 



The Dawn of Lyric Poetry 195 

A Disciple of Wyatt Little Known of His Life 

There is written her fair neck round about ; 
" Noli me tangere ; for Csesar's I am." 

If Surrey, who was but twenty-five when Wyatt died, 
was, as some have maintained, his poetic master, then 
indeed must he have been a precocious youth. But the 
young poet acknowledges his indebtedness. He quotes 
fondly from Wyatt's poems; he declares that his was 

A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme, 

That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit. 
A mark, the which (imperfected for time) 

Some may approach, but never none shall hit. 

Of the sixty poems in his collection, five are eulogies of 
Wyatt. But the pupil was by far the better poet ; his 
work is a long step away from his master's toward the 
glorious company of the Elizabethan singers. 

Of the greater part of Surrey's short thirty years we 
know nothing. He was reared in the seclusion of the 
country; he was educated doubtless by private tutors, 
and he was taken in due time to the royal court, where he 
arose but slowly. Unlike the elder poet he was unfitted 
for diplomatic work; his father was the hero of Flodden, 
and the son had dreams of a martial life. At length he 
had his chance. He went with the troops into Scotland 
and into France. He was a born leader of men ; he was 
rising rapidly, but in an evil hour he fell under the royal 
displeasure. For reasons that are more or less veiled in 
mystery he was condemned to the block, and he died, the 
last victim of the great tyrant. 

The materials for a biography are indeed fragmentary, 
but in many ways they are sufficient. They make clear 
to us his personality. His temper was hasty and im- 



196 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Personality Impetuous, Extravagant, Original 

perious; in his own words he was full of ** the fury of 
reckless youth "; he found it hard " to learn how to 
bridle [his] heady will." He was thrice in prison, once 
for going at midnight about the city with a boisterous 
crew, '* breaking many glass windows both of houses 
and churches and shooting at men in the street." He 
was proud, independent, original; more impetuous than 
Wyatt, less serious and sincere. 

In the externals of his work Surrey far surpassed 
Wyatt. He was a better workman ; his ear for rhythm 
and rhyme was more sensitive, his hand more skilful. 
He was more painstaking and accurate. The task for 
both poets was no light one; the language had never 
before been poured into the hght, dainty mold of the 
love lyric. Wyatt was more timid, — even in his deepest 
passion he clung closely to his, foreign models; Surrey 
was too self-confident, too headstrong, long to follow in 
another's path. He was a leader, imperious and original, 
and he broke quickly away from his early masters. He 
was in danger of going to extremes, even to the extreme 
of ** Skeltonian Hcense." He was more gay and trivial 
than Wyatt. A youth in the twenties, fond of the glitter 
and the flattery of the court, fond of war, Hfe was to him 
no very serious thing. His love songs are too extrava- 
gant, too impulsive, to be the index of any deep feeling. 
They trip gracefully and merrily compared with those of 
his ** elder brother in the muse." They have a sweet 
lilting movement, and a lightness that make some of 
Wyatt's efforts seem almost grotesque, but they never 
reach the depth of passion or the intensity of feeling 
which the elder poet often touched. 

External nature, doubtless because of his early asso- 



The Dawn of Lyric Poetry 197 



A Lover of External Nature His Blank Verse 

ciations, appealed most strongly to Surrey. His verse is 
full of green fields and song-birds. What a sweet Chau- 
cerian note in his sonnet on the springtime, beginning 

The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings, 
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale. 

In Surrey's translation of the second and fourth books 
of the ^neidvjQ find the first English blank verse. As 
a whole the work possesses no great merit ; it is far from 
being smooth and correct, the meter halts often, and the 
tale is not seldom commonplace ; but here and there are 
grand lines and passages prophetic of the great days of 
Shakespeare and Milton, who were to make this instru- 
ment the medium of their mighty creations. Such pas- 
sages as this are not far behind the best Elizabethan 
efforts : 

As wrestling winds, out of dispersed whirl 
Befight themselves, the west with southern blast, 
And gladsome east proud of Aurora's horse ; 
The woods do whiz ; and foamy Nereus 
Raging in fury, with three-forked mace 
From bottom's depth doth welter up the seas ; 
So came the Greeks. 

Required Readings. " The Soote Season " ; ** Wyatt 
Rested Here"; ** Alas! so all Things now"; ** From 
Tuscane Came " ; *' London! Hast thou Accused me ? " 
Aldine Edition. 

The Courtly Makers. Wyatt and Surrey were but the 
leaders of the school of ** courtly makers." Grimald, 
who was doubtless the editor of TotteV s 1557. Totters Miscei- 
Miscellany , Lord Vaux, Churchyard, ^^"y- 

r- ■ \u ^U f -^7 C. /// ^576. TheParadyseof 

Gascoigne, the author of T/ie Steel Glass, Daynty Devises. 



198 The Foundations of English Literature 



The Courtly Makers Influence of the Early Ljrrists 

1578. The Gorgious one of the earliest English satires (see 
Gallery of Gallant Arber's Reprint), and Sackville, who is 

Inventions. j. /' 

1584. A Handefuii of numbered among the Elizabethan singers, 
Pleasant Deiites. ^jj belonged to the merrv company. 

1592. Breton's Bower ^ J f J 

of Deiites. From the moment of the publication of 

'"N^r^ ^ ^ °" " * ^ TotteVs Miscellany the school had control 
1597. The Arbor of of English poetry. At least ten collec- 
is^^ThT^asIlonate ^ions of poctry modeled on Tottel's were 

Pilgrim. published during the reign of Elizabeth, 

1600. England's Heli- , ,, • .1 1 1. 

con. some of them going through many edi- 

1602. A Poetical Rhap- tions. TotteV s Miscellanv was published 

sody. 

eight times before 1587, and the Paradyse 
of Daynty Devises went through nine editions between 
1576 and 1606. 

The influence of these early lyrists in schooling Eng- 
land for the new era cannot be estimated. '* They 
gave," says Collins, ** the death-blow to that rudeness, 
that grotesqueness, that prolixity, that diffuseness, that 
pedantry, which had deformed with fatal persistency the 
poetry of mediaevalism, and while they purified our lan- 
guage from the Gallicisms of Chaucer and his followers, 
they fixed the permanent standard of our versification." 
Much that they wrote is rude and unfinished. It is not 
easy to read long in their ** squared sonnets." One has 
to drive himself to the task, but their work is immeasur- 
ably superior to that of their immediate predecessors. 
And all at once as we read on we find ourselves in the 
glorious era of Elizabeth. " It is," says Washburn, ** as 
if like the first voyagers over the Atlantic, after picking 
up in the waste a bough or two laden with spring blos- 
soms and hearing the voice of a stray land bird, we had 
suddenly come on the vision of a fresh continent." 



TABLE VII.— AGE OF THE RENAISSANCE, 1485-1557 



English Literature. English History 



I. Prose. 

1. Sir Thomas More, 

1485-1535. 
Utopia, 1516 ; trans- 
lation, 1 55 1. 
Richard III., 1557. 

2. Roger Ascham, 

1515-1586. 
Toxophilus, 1544. 
The Sc hole master, 
1570. 

3. William Tyndale, 

1484-15 36. 

Translation of New 
Testament, 1525 

The Practice of Prel- 
ates, 1531. 

4. Hugh Latimer, 

1491-1555. 
The Ploughers, 1549. 
Seven Sermons, 1549. 

II. Poetry. 

1. Sir Thomas Wyatt, 

1503-1542. 
Songs and Sonnets, 

2. Henry Howard, 

Earl of Surrey, 
1517-1547. 
Translation of the 
y^neid,'?>ook'&\\. 
and IV. 
Songs and Sonnets. 

3. Other Courtly 

Makers : 
George Gascoigne, 

1525-1577. 
Thomas Sackville, 

1536-1608. 
Nicholas Grimald, 

1519-1562. 



The Tudor Era. 
1485-1509. Henry VII. 

1497. Cornish Rebel 
lion. 

1499. Colet and Eras 
mus at Oxford. 

1505. Colet Dean of 
St. Paul's. 
1509-1547. Henry VIII. 

1 5 13. Battle of Spiers 
and of Flodden. 

1 5 13. Wolsey becomes 
Prime Minister. 

1521. Quarrel of Luther 
with Henry VIII. 

1526. Henry resolves 
on divorce. 

1529, Fall of Wolsey. 

1 53 1. King acknowl- 
edged as supreme 
head of the Church 

1535. Execution of 
More, 

1539. Suppression o 
greater Abbeys. 

1547. Execution of Sur- 
rey. 
1547-1553. Edward VI. 

1547, Battle of Pinkie 
Cleugh. 

1548. Book of Common 
Prayer. 

1553-1558. Mary. 

1554. Mary marries 
Philip of Spain. 

1555. Persecution o f 
Protestants begins. 

1556. Burning of 
Cranmer, 

1558, Loss of Calais. 
1558-1603. Elizabeth. 

199 



Foreign. 



1474-1533. Ariosto. 

Rise of Romantic 

Epic, 
1475-1564. Michel An- 

gelo. 
1477-1576. Titian. 
1478-15 II, Giorgione. 
1483-1520. Raphael. 
1490-1547. Vittoria Co- 

lonna. Rise of Lyric 

Poetry. 
1492. Columbus. 

1497. Cabot discovers 
North America, 

1498. Da Gama rounds 
Africa, 

1498. Savonarola 

burned. 
1500. The theory of 

Copernicus. 
1506. First stone of St, 

Peter's. 

1 5 16. Erasmus' Greek 
Testament. 

1517. Luther's XCV. 
Theses, 

1520, Cortez conquers 
Mexico. 

1523. Luther's New 
Testament. 

1524, Birth of Ronsard. 
1547. Cervantes born. 
1549, Tasso born. 
1553. Death of Ra- 
belais. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA 

Authorities. The most serviceable and accessible 
authorities for the general student are Manly, Specimens 
of the Pre -Shakespearian Drama ; Pollard, English Mir- 
acle Plays ; Symonds, Shakespeare's Predecessors^ and 
Morley, English Writers, One who wishes to pursue 
the subject further can consult Ward, History of English 
Dramatic Literature ; Fleay, Chronicle History of the 
London Stage^ and Biographical Chronicle of the English 
Drama; Ulrici, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, 2.n^Q,Q\\\^v, 
History of English Dramatic Poetry, all scholarly and 
exhaustive works. For a complete bibliography, see 
Stoddard, References for Students of Miracle Plays and 
Mysteries, University of California, Bulletin No. 8, and 
A Brief Bibliography of the English Drama before Eliza- 
beth, University of Chicago Publications. 

The history of the English drama is a story of ** back- 
sliding." The Miracle play had sprung from the most 
sacred rites of the Church ; its earliest mission had been 
to instruct, to inspire, to make holy. It had wandered 
at length from its early surroundings even into the 
streets, and little by little its earnestness, its piety and 
holiness, had faded into mere morality. The clergy for- 
sook it ; it passed into the fellowship of laymen and of 
laborers. Gradually it became more and more worldly; 
it threw off the last vestige of its religious life, until the 
simple artisans turned away and left it the companion of 
wild roisterers and professional mountebanks, whose only 



The Evolution of the Drama 201 



The Moralities Their Epic Nature 

object was to amuse, to fill with forgetfulness an idle 
hour. And this might have been the end had not the 
new learning rescued it and turned it into wider channels. 
7. The Moralities. It is impossible to fix a date even 
approximating the time when the Miracle play began to 
shade into the Morality ; when abstractions, mere person- 
ifications of good and evil qualities, began to displace the 
old Bible characters. The Castle of Perseverence^ the 
earliest Morality play that has come down to us, belongs 
to the reign of Henry VI. ; but it is certain that Moralities 
were acted much earlier. The change was a gradual one. 
The Miracle play, as Ulrici declares, was epic in its char- 
acter. 

The action is still a purely external occurrence, the reasons and motives 
of which lie beyond the stage, nay, generally beyond this earthly life ; no 
action is derived from the life and character of the dramatic personages, of 
results from previous conditions and relations ; every character appears un- 
expectedly and unprepared, like an accidental occurrence in nature ; every 
action appears but as the special incident of the plan designed by God in 
Bible history, and consequently, as in the epos, depends more or less upon 
the invisible threads with which the Divine Power directs the lives of mor- 
tals ; in short, the action takes place more for men than through men. 
The latter are merely tools in the hand of God, or the vessels which have 
to receive the Divine will, and to, carry out the Divine act ; the whole story 
passes by them, like a mere occurrence, their personal participation consists 
only in the feeling, sympathy, and receptive activity of their minds ; the 
individuality, the freedom of the will, the character of the persons repre- 
sented, do not come the least into the play. — Shakespeare' s Dramatic Art. 

It was impossible for the drama to remain long on 
this level and retain its hold on the people. From the 
very first secular elements began to steal in. Noah's 
wife with her gossiping circle, and the shepherds of the 
Nativity, who are but rude English peasants, were a wide 



202 The Foundations of English Literature 

Gradual Introduction of Secular Elements Abundance of Action 

departure from the biblical and spiritual world. It was 
this human addition alone that kept the Miracle plays 
alive after their first spiritual glow had passed. The ele- 
ment was constantly increased. Pharaoh and Pilate be- 
came in time mere ranting clowns; Herod was permitted 
even to leave the stage and rage in the street, and the 
actor who could ** out-Herod Herod," in Shakespeare's 
phrase, pleased best the common people. To reconcile 
this secular element with the traditional religious basis of 
the plays, allegory was gradually introduced, and at 
length the Morality play pure and simple was evolved. 
Its creation marks an epoch in the history of the drama. 
" It is the transition of the drama from heaven to earth, 
from the next world of the religious conception to the 
present one of the moral action, from the ideal to the 
real." 

As a whole, the Moralities are dry indeed. Few read- 
ers have the will power to force themselves far into the 
dusty mass. The plays have almost no literary merit, 
but they are full of possibilities for action. The action 
is everything ; without it the play is a lifeless heap. In 
each there is a clown, who is some element of perverse- 
ness, — Vice, Sin, Fraud, Iniquity, — and his fun consists 
almost wholly in blows, quarrelings, and impish tricks. 
At every opportunity he belabors the devil, who roars 
lustily and at length carries him off on his back to the 
flames. 

In the Moralities we pass the border-line between 
known and unknown authorship. The early drama was 
anonymous; the Miracle plays seem to have sprung up 
as spontaneously as Beowulf ; we can only guess at their 
origin ; a few of the later Moralities however are by known 



The Evolution of the Drama 203 

Skelton's Magnificeyice Everyman, and Hyke Scorner 

writers. One of the earHest figures on this vague frontier 
is the poet Skelton, who is known to have produced four 
MoraHty plays, one of which, Magnificence, has survived. 
Its plot illustrates fully the methods employed by this 
whole class of plays. Magnificence, the title character, 
while in perplexity, takes as counsellors a motley crowd 
of seeming friends: Fancy, Counterfeit-countenance, 
Cloaked-collusion, Crafty-conveyance, and others, and 
following their advice is brought to ruin. " He comes 
under the blows of Adversity," says Pollard, " is visited 
by Poverty, Despair, and Mischief. Only the entrance 
of Good Hope saves him from suicide, but by the 
aid of Redress, Sad Circumspection, and Perseverance 
he is eventually restored to his high estate." Even 
from this bare description it can easily be gathered how 
much of the interest depended on the players, upon their 
costumes and behavior. 

From a literary standpoint, the best of the Moralities 
are doubtless Everyman, probably written late in the 
fifteenth century, and Hyke Scorner, which stands on the 
border-line between the Morality and the Interlude. 

Required Reading. Description of the manner of act- 
ing The Castle of Per sever ence, Pollard, p. 197; and Pol- 
lard's selection from Everyman. Consult Hamlet, III., 
ii., and Midsummer Nighf s Dream, I., ii., and V., i. 

2. Heywood' s Interludes. The Morality play allowed 
far more freedom to the dramatist than did the Miracle. 
It dealt v/ith a broader range of subjects; it could draw 
its characters from the lives of saints and the legendary 
history of the Church, as well as from the whole field of 
abstract human qualities, and it offered far wider oppor- 
tunities for action and for rough humor; but it was still 



204 The Foundations of English Literature 

Characters Lifeless and Wooden Introduction of Personal Types 

greatly restricted. The religious element was still its 
basis, and its characters were of necessity wooden and 
lifeless. They lacked flesh and blood; an abstract qual- 
ity personified can never be galvanized into life. The 
abundance of action in the Moralities, the buffoonery and 
horse-play, had kept them alive ; they had pleased the 
people precisely as the Punch-and-Judy shows please 
children to-day; but without an added element they 
never could have made an advance. The drama, says 
Miss Bates, had '* dribbled into miserable hybrids neither 
secular nor sacred." But at length a saving element 
began to appear; actual men and women, familiar village 
types, began to take places among the puppets. Hyke 
Scorner, the last of the Moralities, brings before us a de- 
lightful study from real life. He is a creature of the 
borderland bearing the name of an abstract human attri- 
bute and yet characterized until we recognize the type. 

Suddenly at this point there appeared a writer ** bold 
enough," in the words of Ward, *' to throw overboard 
altogether the traditionary machinery and the personified 
abstractions of allegory and elevate to the first place the 
personal types which had been gradually introduced." 
With Heywood the English drama lost the last traces of 
its religious origin : it was no longer to be a medium of 
instruction ; its sole function was to amuse. 

In creating the Interlude Heywood was only obeying 
the voice of the times. The reign of Henry VIII. was 
an era of untold love of ostentation and amusement. A 
gay whirl of pleasure was in constant demand. Every 
court occasion, every move of the sovereign or his circle, 
must be accompanied with appropriate pageants and 
plays, the more gay and boisterous the better. To meet 



The Evolution of the Drama 205 

Heywood's Interludes The Four P's 

the extravagant demands of the times a class of profes- 
sional actors had sprung up. Not only the King but also 
many of the nobles kept bands of players continually in 
their employ. There was an unusual demand for plays, 
and vast numbers were created, many of them extempo- 
raneous productions which perished with the occasion. 
All through the Tudor century, that most intense and 
active era in English history, plays and pageants were 
made and acted in unheard-of profusion. It was John 
Heywood, a musician and actor in the court of Henry 
VIII. who, more than any one else, directed the current 
into its new channel. He realized that the demand was 
for short secular pieces, — little farces that went with 
vigor and snap and were soon over; and his The Pardoner 
and the Friar, The Four P's, and other pieces mark 
another era in English dramatic history. 

The Four P' s may be taken as a type of the Interlude. 
The plot is simple indeed. Four familiar characters, a 
Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary, and a Pedler, engage in 
a lying contest, and the prize is won by the Palmer, who 
declares that 

In all places where I haue ben 
Of all the women that I haue sene, 
I neuer sawe or knewe, in my consyens, 
Any one woman out of paciens. 

The humor of the piece consists almost wholly in the droll 
raillery of the actors at each other's professions, in coarse 
jokes and allusions, in puns, and animated disputes. 
There is such a redundancy of wit that it becomes weari- 
some and even nauseating. In Heywood's Play between 
John the Husband and Tyb the Wife we are shown the 



2o6 The Foundations of English Literature 

Influence of the New Learning The Rise of Comedy 

woes of a henpecked husband, which culminate in a hard 
beating for the poor victim. 

Required Reading. Heywood, The Pardoner and 
the Friar in Pollard, English Miracle Plays, 

J. The Classic Comedy. It is at this point that the line 
of the new learning crosses the path of the drama. The 
Interludes had been without a trace of foreign influence; 
they had grown spontaneously and naturally from the 
native religious drama; but in 1536, or later, while Hey- 
wood was still writing, Nicholas Udall, a scholar of note, 
head master of Eton, and afterwards head master of West- 
minster School, turned his attention to dramatic work, 
and, like a true son of the Renaissance, modeled his play 
after classic patterns. The writers most prized by the 
new learning seem to have been Plautus, Terence, and 
Seneca. Erasmus and others of his school knew their 
Terence by heart. It is not strange that Udall, attempt- 
ing an English drama, should turn to these Latin masters, 
that he should declare in his prologue that Plautus and 
Terence " among the learned at this day bear the bell." 
His Ralph Roister Bolster is but a careful imitation of the 
Miles Gloriosus of Plautus. Heywood had depended on 
dialogue, on incessant rapier flashes of wit ; he had drawn 
his characters from actual life, but he had not attempted 
the development of character by dialogue and action. 
The plays of Plautus had aimed to reproduce their age 
by means of comic characterization; they had made 
studies from real life, and they had depended not alone 
upon dialogue and brilliancy of wit but upon action 
and contrasts of character. Udall held to the best 
points of both the Latin and the English drama, and the 
result was an epoch-making work, — Ralph Roister Bolster ^ 



The Evolution of the Drama 207 

Ralph Roister JDoister Gammer Gurtons Nedle 

the first English comedy. It is not in itself a great play; 
it is full of Latin echoes; its principal characters are 
copied faithfully from Plautus; its methods are borrowed 
either from the Latin master or from Heywood, — but 
nevertheless it marks a new tendency. In it we find 
blended for the first time naturalness, individuality of 
characterization, sprightliness of dialogue, brilliancy of 
wit, and freedom of action. It is also significant that it 
is divided into five acts, each subdivided into scenes. 

Udall's work was followed before 1562 by another 
notable comedy, Gammer Gurtons Nedle, by an anony- 
mous writer, perhaps John Still, Bishop of Bath and 
Wells. At first sight it seems like a step backward, for, 
compared with Ralph Roister Bolster, the play is rude 
and unclassic, the plot is exceedingly slender, and the 
humor and the language are coarse and popular. A care- 
ful reading of the comedy, however, quickly corrects such 
an estimate. The play is unquestionably the most prom- 
ising dramatic work that had been produced in England 
up to that time. It was but a step from Gammer Gurton 
to the Comedy of Errors and the Merry Wives of Windsor, 
for its characters are living people, and they act and 
speak and think just as might be expected of characters 
in their walk of life and under the same conditions. The 
play manifestly tried to follow classic rules, but notwith- 
standing this its spirit is almost wholly English. It takes 
us into the coarse, brutal world of the English peasantry. 
We can imagine as we read it where the early audiences 
would burst into boisterous merriment. Such people are 
insensible to the more delicate forms of wit and humor: 
nothing will make them laugh but coarse horse-play, vul- 
gar jokes, and hard blows. When Dr. Rat appears with 



2o8 The Foundations of English Literature 

Its Characterizations Its Truth to Nature 

his broken head, all burst into a roar which increases the 
more he complains, and the climax of mirth comes when 
the two good wives of the play, after exhausting their 
copious vocabularies, fall upon each other, tooth and 
nail. It is no imaginary picture; it is the real England 
that we are looking at, and these are types of the great 
majority of its people. These rude creatures in scanty 
leather clothing, with their narrow little world, with their 
ignorance, their nearness to the soil, are as truly English- 
men as the perfumed gallants of the great Henry's court. 
How full of coarse life they are! With what broad 
strokes are Hodge, and Tyb, and Dame Chat, and Dr. 
Rat made real to us! It is as if we were actually visiting 
a rural hamlet. We feel acquainted even with Gyb, the 
cat, jumping into ** the milk-pan over head and ears"; 
crouching in the fireplace until Hodge blows upon her 
eyes, thinking them coals ; and gasping with a bone in 
her throat until all believe that she has swallowed the 
needle. There is a touch of nature in the work, an un- 
conscious portrayal of character, a study of life at first 
hand, that promised glorious things. It is a document 
in the nation's history; it gives us more of the actual 
Tudor England than the whole school of the Courtly 
Makers with their elaborate library of miscellanies. Eng- 
land was moving with huge strides toward its greatest 
creative epoch. 

Required Reading. Drinking song in Act. II. of 
Gam^ner Gurton, " Back and syde go bare," and Act III., 
iv. ; Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearian Drama , 
Vol. ii. 

4.. The Classic Tragedy, (See Cunliffe, The Influence 
of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy.^ Only one more step 



The Evolution of the Drama 209 

Influence of Seneca Attempts to Naturalize Classic Tragedy 

was necessary to prepare the English drama for the great 
masters who were so soon to mold it into its final form. 
Up to this point there had been no attempt at artistic 
development; there had been no appreciation of " dra- 
matic form." Even in the early comedies, which had 
been produced confessedly under the influence of Plautus 
and Terence, ** the action," in the words of Ulrici, " is 
still devoid of anything like an organic center; it consists 
merely of a series of comic scenes, which turn upon the 
unraveling of a simple and in itself an unimportant plot." 
This sense of artistic form is first found in the tragedies 
which sprang up shortly after the appearance of the early 
comedy. During the middle of the century the later 
Latin writers, especially Seneca, became exceedingly 
popular with English scholars. In the decade following 
the year 1559 no less than five English authors busied 
themselves with translations from Seneca, and in 1581 a 
complete edition of his works was issued. It was but 
natural that in such an active era there should spring 
up an English drama modeled upon Seneca and his 
school. 

To naturalize in England the classic tragedy, however, 
was by no means an easy task. The comedy had proved 
easily adaptable ; it had found in the early English plays 
many elements which it could appropriate. The Inter- 
ludes of Heywood had paved the way for the entrance of 
real comedy, but tragedy, especially after the model of 
Seneca, was an exotic form. It was highly artificial ; it 
required but little action; it depended upon sonorous 
lines, — upon ringing forensic dialogue; it held rigidly to 
the unities of time, place, and action; and, permeated 
with the Greek artistic sense, it kept in the background 



2IO The Foundations of English Literature 

The Tragedy Gorboduc Other Early Tragedies 

all realistic details of suffering or death. The new school 
turned away completely from the rude native drama : they 
would throw it away utterly and substitute the purely 
classic type. Roger Ascham in The Scholemaster lamented 
that not one of the English plays " is able to abyde the 
trew touch of Aristotle's preceptes and Euripides' ex- 
amples," and even Sidney, at the very dawn of the new 
era, complained bitterly of the wholesale violations of the 
classic requirements. 

The earliest of these tragedies, Gorboduc or Ferrex and 
Porrex, the joint work of Thomas Norton and Thomas 
Sackville, was first acted in 1562. It is a significant pro- 
duction, for, though it falls far short of the Senecan 
models, and though it is dreary and monotonous, a mere 
running series, to use Sidney's description, " of stately 
speeches and well sounding phrases, climbing to the 
height of Seneca his style," each announcing deaths and 
murders by the wholesale, ** its theme is serious and of 
tragic significance; the treatment is dignified, and, from 
the special point of view, adequate." The play is also 
significant since it used for the first time blank verse for 
dramatic purposes, and since it drew its plot from the 
national history. Following its lead there came a long 
series of tragedies whose subjects came more and more 
from the national chronicles: Tancred and Gismunda, 
The Misfortunes of Arthur, The Troublesome Raign of 
King John, and numerous others. Compared with the 
later drama they are still rude and inartistic: their 
tragedy consists merely of recitals of slaughter; their art 
lies wholly in their careful imitation of classic models; 
they possess no trace of the spontaneousness and natural- 
ness of the early comedies, — and yet despite all this their 



The Evolution of the Drama 211 

A Master Needed to Give the Drama its Final Form 

advent was a long step in the direction of the regular 
drama. 

It must not be gathered that the English drama was a 
perfect evolution, that with each advance the old type 
disappeared and the new took its place. As a matter of 
fact, the Miracle plays persisted until well into the cen- 
tury; the Chester Cycle was still acted in 1577; ^^^ ^.s 
late as 1601, while Shakespeare and his group were in the 
full tide of production, Queen Elizabeth took pleasure in 
witnessing a Morality play of the most primitive type. It 
has been our purpose to note only the tendency of the 
drama, and to show that despite the seeming confusion, 
despite the persistence of early types, it was steadily 
moving forward toward more perfect form and methods. 
Notwithstanding the fact that in 1579, the year that we 
have taken as the close of our period, all varieties of dra- 
matic work were simultaneously before the people; not- 
withstanding that the field seemed to be a chaos and 
that no one type of dramatic art had reached perfection 
or had in any way shown itself strong enough to lead 
the others, it must nevertheless be remembered that all 
of the elements which finally produced the Elizabethan 
drama had been evolved, and that it needed but the 
hand of a master to mold them into their ultimate form 
and to breathe into them the breath of life. 



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212 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 

1 579-1649 

From Spenser's ** Shepheardes Calender " to the Estab- 
lishment OF THE Commonwealth 

Authorities. Froude, History of England from the Fall 
of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, is the supreme author- 
ity ; the best short history is Creighton, Age of Elizabeth. 
Bright, History of England, Vol. ii. ; Creighton, The 
Tudor s and the Reformation ; Macaulay, Essay on Lord 
Burleigh, and Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy, may 
be consulted with profit. Lingard, History of Ejzgland, 
tells the story from the Catholic point of view. To gain 
a vivid conception of the era one should also consult 
Harrison, Elizabethan England {Cdcvcv^lot Series) ; Thorn- 
bury, Shakespeare's England ; Goadby, Shakespeare's 
England ; Drake, Shakespeare and his Times, and War- 
ner, The People for whom Shakespeare Wrote . For literary 
conditions, see Hazlitt, Elizabethan Literature; Whipple, 
The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth; Saintsbury, 
Elizabethan Literature ; Qv oils, English Literature, 1509- 
1625, and Hannay, The Later Reriaissance. 

The great intellectual awakening of the fifteenth cen- 
tury commonly known as the Renaissance produced 
more immediate effects upon the Latin nations of Europe 
than upon the Teutonic. Under its influence, Italy, 
France, and Spain burst all in a moment into a new intel- 
lectual life, but the northern nations, especially England, 
developed more slowly. We have already noted how 

213 



214 The Foundations of English Literature 



The Renaissance Enters England Slowly An Era of Fierce Storm 

the new learning, the earliest English phase of the Ren- 
aissance, had drifted into religious and social channels. 
Instead of becoming at once, as in Italy 
Ma^chiaveih, 1469- ^^^ France, a constructive power impel- 
Ariosto, 1474-1533. ling the nation toward artistic creation, 
1564! "^* °' ^*^^~ it took from the very first a destructive 
vittoria Coionna, form, and it directed its first energies 
Rabelais, 1495-1553. against the corruptions and excesses of 
Marot, 1497-1544. the national Church. It insisted upon 

Ronsard, 1524-1585. 

Montaigne, 1533-1592. mild mcasurcs ; It would purge away 
Boscan, 1493-1550. evils, rchVious and social, by a g-radual 

Garcilaso, 1503-1536. . . 

Cervantes, 1547-1616. cvolution through cducatiou and en- 
Lope^ de Vega, 1562- Ughtenmcnt. But the impetuous and 
self-seeking spirit of Henry VIII. pre- 
cipitated the work of reform, and the Protestantism of 
Luther, which entered England at this critical moment, 
threw everything into confusion. An era of storm and 
change followed. Four times within a single generation 
was the national religion changed, and each change 
was accompanied by a veritable ** reign of terror." In 
the words of Macaulay, " Edward persecuted Catho- 
lics. Mary persecuted Protestants. Elizabeth persecuted 
Catholics again. The father of those three sovereigns 
had enjoyed the pleasure of persecuting both sects at 
once." Until well into the reign of Elizabeth England 
was a seething cauldron, and the very thought of literary 
art well-nigh died out of English hearts. 

The Era of Reconstruction. The first twenty years of 
Elizabeth were as barren of original literary products as 
was any other equal period since the days of Edward III. 
Almost nothing save translations from the Latin came 
from the English presses. The accession of EHzabeth 



The Age of Elizabeth 215 

A Critical Period in English History The Fear of Spain 

was a time of doubt and fear; it was the most critical 
period in English history. The island had been swept 
by a tidal wave; nothing seemed fixed and permanent. 

For fifty years [says R. W. Church] the English people had had before 
its eyes the great vicissitudes which make tragedy. They had seen the 
most unforeseen and most unexpected revolutions in what had for ages been 
held certain and immovable ; the overthrow of the strongest institutions, 
and the most venerable authorities ; the violent shifting of feelings from 
faith to passionate rejection, from reverence to scorn and a hate which 
could not be satisfied. They had seen the strangest turns of fortune, the 
most wonderful elevations to power, the most terrible visitations of dis- 
grace. They had seen the mightiest ruined, the brightest and most ad- 
mired brought down to shame and death, men struck down with all the 
forms of law, whom the age honored as its noblest ornaments. . . . Such 
a time of surprise — of hope and anxiety, of horror and anguish to-day, of 
relief and exultation to-morrow — had hardly been in England as the first 
half of the sixteenth century. All that could stir men's souls, all that could 
inflame their hearts, or that could wring them, had happened. 

The future looked black and threatening. Elizabeth 
was regarded with fear and distrust. Her speedy mar- 
riage was thought to be inevitable, and the destinies of 
England were in the hands of her husband, whoever he 
might be. The reign of Mary had thrown the shadow of 
an inevitable conflict over the island ; before England 
could again be free she must defeat Spain, the wealth- 
iest and most powerful nation of Europe. As the husband 
of Mary, Philip had claimed England as a part of his 
own vast empire, and he had consented to the accession 
of Elizabeth under the firm belief that she would continue 
the Catholic faith and would at once consent to unite 
with him in marriage. The Inquisition was to be ex- 
tended to England, and the future of the island was to 
be merged into that of the great empire of the South. 
Such was the state of affairs in 1558. No wonder that 



2i6 The Foundations of English Literature 



Perplexities that Beset Elizabeth Her Peculiar Policy 

the nation was restless and fearful; no wonder that it 
took more than twenty years of her reign to restore con- 
fidence in English hearts. 

We need not follow the windings of Elizabeth's career. 
No monarch was ever beset with more perplexities — re- 
ligious, political, and personal. During the first half of 
her reign the religious quarrel was active and dangerous, 
but at last, under her peculiar policy. Protestantism be- 
1533. Birth of Eliza. Came firmly established. During nearly 
beth. thirty years Mary Queen of Scots, who 

1558. Her Coronation. , , , , , , 

1560. Scotland and had been named as her successor and 
Ireland Added to ^j^q ^^g to reestablish the Catholic 

the Crown. ^11 

1566. Birth of James. Church, was a constant danger; what- 
1570. Elizabeth Ex- ^^^j. |.]^g Quecn might do with her was 

communicated. "^ ^ 

1572. St. Barthoio- opcn to ficrcc criticism. Her policy on 
"1*^^^, , r ■ the whole, was one of toleration. The 

1576. Blackfriars 

Theatre. scaffold on Towcr Hill went to decay; 

1580. The Jesuit In- -^^ fourteen years not a single noble went 

vasion. -^ o 

1587. Shakespeare in to cxccution. She made cvcry effort to 
158^7!° Mary Behead- ^^^P ^hc nation from war, and every in- 

ed. terval of peace she used in adding to the 

^^ArmLa.** ^^"^^ national resources and strengthening the 
1598. The Irish Re- country for possible emergencies. Her 
1603. 'Breath of Eliza- strong point was diplomacy. So skil- 

^«*^' fully did she play her antagonists against 

each other, — promising marriage first to this one, then to 
that, seizing each point of vantage and using every pos- 
sible means of retreat, and deceiving in a thousand wily 
ways, and again and again, the most subtle diplomats of 
Europe, — that she succeeded in putting off for thirty 
years the inevitable conflict with Spain, and when at 
last it came she was more than ready. 



The Age of Elizabeth 217 



Her Success Rise of the Sea-Kings 

It took a quarter of a century of such statesmanship to 
reassure England and to bring back confidence and 
** national consciousness." They came all at once. 
When the great Armada, loaded with the soldiery that 
for years had been spreading terror over the Low Countries 
of Europe, and filled with shackles and instruments of 
torture for the establishment of an English Inquisition, 
had at length, by sheer English pluck and skill, been sent 
flying up the Channel, there arose from the whole nation 
a mighty shout of patriotic pride and exultation, and 
with that shout was born the England of to-day. 

The Sea-Kings. It was almost literally a new England 
that swelled this burst of patriotism. While the Queen 
had been struggling with her problems, while she had been 
coquetting with kings and ambassadors, and had been 
postponing with all her wily arts the inevitable struggle 
with Spain, a new spirit and a new nation had grown up 
around her. The new world beyond the Atlantic had in- 
fluenced mightily the imagination of the age. The ships 
of Pizarro and Cortez with their loads of gold and gems 
had filled all Europe with feverish un- 
rest. After these realities nothing seemed '563. HawkinsOpens 

° the Slave-Trade, 

impossible. The sixteenth century wit- 1572. Drake Harries 
nessed a mad scramble for the wealth of the Spanish Main 

1576-1578. Frobisher's 

the new lands, and England joined early Three voyages. 
in the struggle. The old Viking spirit 'yj^-jnesio^f 
awoke in English hearts ; it was the 1583. Gilbert's coi- 
era of the sea-kings: Drake, Hawkins, °aYd.^° ewoun - 
Frobisher, Gilbert, Cavendish. They 1584-1587. Raleigh's 

1 J . ^ ^ , . . Attempts to Settle 

plunged mto every sea; they searched Virginia. 

the Arctic ice for the Northwest Passage; 1585-1587. Davis seeks 

. . 111. 1 1 1 Northwest Pa»> 

they descended like sea-wolves upon the sage. 



2i8 The Foundations of English Literature 

England's Second Epic Era A Group of Homeric Men 

1585-1588. Drake Har- j-jch bootv of the Spanish Main ; they 

ries the Spaniards. , -r^ r 

1586-1588. Cavendish burst into the unknown Pacific and solved 
?o'^°"I.V'^^ o^"^*^V its secret; they rounded Scandinavia and 

1588. The Spanish ' -^ 

Armada. Opened new routes to Russia and the far 

East. Their exploits read like the deeds of a mythic 
age. It was another epic era, with men of true epic 
mold. When we read of the mad exploits of Drake, 
his dash into the very jaws of the Spanish ports, his de- 
struction of the ships that were building for the great 
Armada, and his capture of the rich East Indiaman in the 
very harbor of Cadiz; or the last fight of the Revenge 
under Sir Richard Grenville, — his ship becalmed and sur- 
rounded by fifteen Spanish men-of-war, fighting hand to 
hand like wolves for fifteen hours, until only twenty of his 
one hundred and fifty men remained alive ; or the last 
words of Gilbert sinking in his foundered vessel, ** We 
are as near to heaven by sea as by land,"-^when we read 
of such deeds by scores and hundreds we no longer 
wonder at the great strides that England all at once 
made in her national life — for what nation could be small 
while witnessing the deeds of such men ; we no longer 
wonder at the sudden burst of Elizabethan literature; 
men had only to write as they lived to make works 
which would be immortal. 

Social Conditions. One of the first results of this new 
age of the Vikings was a mighty increase in English com- 
merce. Along the whole seaboard little towns began to 
awake and to spring into activity and prominence. The 
new slave-trade, the rich products of the Indies, East and 
West, the spoils of the world that now began to pour into 
the home island, increased enormously the national 
wealth. The whole system of society was changed. 



The Age of Elizabeth 219 

Social Conditions Rise of the Common People 

The ancient nobility had well-nigh disappeared and their 
places had been taken by a new aristocracy elevated from 
the middle class and endowed from the broken monas- 
teries. But a new and powerful element was appearing. 
The wealth of the great commercial movement was pour- 
ing into the laps of the middle-class merchants, and they 
soon became a dominating power. It was no longer birtb, 
but wealth, which made the gentleman. The lines of 
caste were breaking down ; every man, no matter what 
his origin, had a chance to rise. 

Below the middle class were the small landholders, — the 
yeomen and cottagers, the sturdy old native stock, then 
as always the muscle and vigor of the nation. We shall 
see them more and more, crowding the theatre pits, 
manning the ships of Frobisher and Drake, swelling the 
armies of Elizabeth and Cromwell. It was a people 
teeming with vitality, eager for activity, intensely re- 
ligious even to superstition. They were prodigal of 
life ; they went to death cheerfully ; they delighted like 
their Teutonic ancestry in hard blows, in danger and 
battle, in reckless adventure. They were brutal in their 
amusements: bear and bull baiting became almost the 
national pastime. 

It was an era of rapid change in manners and customs. 
The nobles were moving out of the dismal, windowless 
castles into bright and comfortable homes ; armor with 
all its accompaniments was rapidly disappearing; a thou- 
sand household comforts, undreamed of in the earlier 
days, were to be found even in the homes of the poor. 
The vast increase of wealth soon led to untold extrava- 
gance. Never before had there been such magnificence 
of apparel. 



2 20 The Foundations of English Literature 

Wealth and Magnificence of the Era Queen Elizabeth 

There was [says Warner] no limit to the caprice and extravagance. 
Hose and breeches of silk, velvet, or other rich stuff, and fringed garters 
wrought of gold or silver, worth five pounds apiece, are some of the items 
noted. Burton says, " 'Tis ordinary for a gallant to put a thousand oaks 
and an hundred oxen into a suit of apparel, to wear a whole manor on his 
back." Even serving-men and tailors wore jewels in their shoes. We 
should note also the magnificence in the furnishing of houses, the arras, 
tapestries, cloth of gold and silver, silk hangings of many colors, the 
splendid plate on the tables and sideboards. Even in the houses of the 
middle classes the furniture was rich and comfortable, and there was an 
air of amenity in the chambers and parlors strewn with sweet herbs and 
daily decked with pretty nosegays and fragrant flowers. — The People for 
whom Shakespeare Wrote. 

Life was gay and joyous; everywhere there was an at- 
mosphere of boundless hope, of infinite possibility. 

Queen Elizabeth. The center of all this activity and 
life was the Queen. ** It may be very well asserted," 
writes Jusserand, ** that whatever the branch of art or 
literature you wish to understand you must first study 
Elizabeth." Rogers* engraving of the Queen arrayed in 
all her magnificence almost surpasses belief. ** Around 
her was a perpetual field of cloth of gold, and the nobles 
sold their lands in order to appear at court sufficiently 
embroidered." Her royal progresses were miracles of 
splendor. Even the pen of Scott was not equal to the 
description of her visit to Kenilworth Castle. To the 
very last her love of finery and gems was a ruling pas- 
sion. After her death there were found in her wardrobe 
no less than three thousand rich dresses. 

After the Armada year the Queen was the national 
idol, the embodiment of the national patriotism. A new 
chivalry flowered about her. Sidney and Raleigh are the 
best types of that gallant and noble group of young men 
that stood ready to do her will, and their spirit permeated 



The Age of Elizabeth 221 

An Outburst of Loyalty and Patriotism The Nation Exults in its Youth 

the whole nation. Again and again in the Elizabethan 
writers, notably in Shakespeare, do we catch the thrill 
of devotion to Queen and to fatherland that was stirring 
in every breast. 

This England never did, nor never shall 

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror. . . . 

Come the three corners of the world in arms 

And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, 

If England to herself do rest but true, 

cries Philip in King Johuy and he, with John of Gaunt in 
Richard 11. , who called England 

This other Eden, demi paradise, . . . 

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 

and with Bolingbroke, who declared that 

Where'er I wander boast of this I can, 
Though banished, yet a true-born Englishman, 

was but voicing the thought of every English heart. 

Such was the England of Elizabeth. It was like a 
youth teeming with life and the sense of power, just freed 
from early restraints, running to excesses, full of romance 
and dreams. The nation had nothing to hamper it; it 
had fought its way into a leading place among the powers 
of the world; it was free, and it had all the resources 
for perfect independence. The language was at last 
ready, — a wonderful instrument, fit for the hands of the 
masters. The new poets and scholars were without 
models to restrain them. The way was clear for creation, 
and there was every incentive. 

Literary Conditions. The year 1579, twenty-one years 



222 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Year 1579 The First Years of Elizabeth a Seed Time 

after the accession of Elizabeth, since it witnessed the 
publication of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, the first 
work since Chaucer showing real poetic inspiration, and 
Lily's EuphueSy ** the first book of Elizabeth's reign 
which attained to really commanding notoriety," may 
be taken as the opening date of the great creative period 
generally known as the Elizabethan era. But the twenty- 
, one years, thous^h barren of actual liter- 

1552. Spenser ana -' ' " 

Raleigh. ary production, are full of wonderful 

'^S\y.''°°''" ^"*^ literary interest. The great writers who 
1554. Sidney. wcrc to be the chief glory of her reign 

^^Peeie.° ^*' ^^ ' Were most of them unborn when the 
1559. Chapman. Qucen took the throne. ** The immor- 
1561! Bacon^ tals ncvcr appear alone," says Schiller: 

1562. Daniel. within the short space of twelve years 

1564*. Marlowe and there was bom in England the most 

Shakespeare. marvclous group of literary masters 

since the days of Greece. It was the early springtime of 
a great era. On every side there were bursting and 
springing the germs that so long had waited for mild and 
peaceful skies. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance so 
long repressed at last was free. The fearful pressure that 
had been on English hearts was lifting; men could dream 
of toleration and freedom. The new learning had edu- 
cated England. With a sovereign who could read Greek 
and write Latin verse, ignorance was no longer fashion- 
able. The grammar schools were giving new life to the 
middle classes ; more persons could read in England than 
at any previous time in her history, and this fact created 
a wide demand for reading matter. An era of translation 
followed. Ascham, who wrote his Scholemaster between 
1563 and 1568, declared that *' bookes, of late translated 



The Age of Elizabeth 223 

Growing Popularity of Translations The City of London 

out of Italian into English, [were] sold in every shop in 
London," and he further added that " there be moe of 
these vngratious bookes set out in Printe within these 
few monethes, than have bene sene in England many 
score yeares before." In the twenty-five years following 
Surrey's translation of the ySnetd there appeared no less 
than twenty-five important translations from the Latin 
and the Italian, more than half of them being from 
Seneca, Ovid, and Virgil. Nearly all of the great crea- 
tors — Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare — began with trans- 
lations or imitations of classic writers. 

Thus after more than a century the Renaissance entered 
England. The same enthusiasm for the ancient masters, 
the same eager spirit of creation, the same sensuous de- 
light in beauty and in art, the same spontaneous outpour- 
ings of genius that had marked the Italian Renaissance, 
now marked the English. The literary product, like that 
of Italy, was dominated by the Greek spirit, and yet it 
was spontaneous and original. The era ended with the 
Commonwealth, when a new order gained the ascendency 
in England. For a period, the Hebraic spirit was in con- 
trol ; the Bible was the central fact in English religion, 
politics, and literature. 

The Elizabethan literature was the literature of a city ; 
during the whole of the era London, so far as literature 
was concerned, was England. Outside its limits the 
island was still in the barren era that had followed Chau- 
cer. In addition to this, the literature of London was 
for the rich and the elegant. Spenser then, as now, 
appealed to a small and select audience; Lily wrote 
confessedly only for fashionable ladies, and even the 
dramatists, though the poorer classes crowded the theatre 



224 The Foundations of English Literature 

Historical Novels and Poems Dealing with the Era 

pits, wrote first of all for the rich and the noble. A real- 
ization of these facts will add much to an understanding 
of the Elizabethan writers. 

Suggested Reading. Scott, Kenilworth, The Monas- 
tery ySXid The Abbot ; Kingsley, Westward Ho ! ; Macau- 
lay's poem. The Armada; Miss Yonge, Unknown to 
History; Wordsworth, White Doe of Rylstone ; Tenny- 
son, Queen Mary ; Swinburne, Mary Stuart, 



CHAPTER XVII 

SIDNEY AND SPENSER 

Authorities. The best materials for a study of the 
period between Wyatt and Spenser are Arber's editions 
of Googe, EglogueSy Epitaphs, and Sonnets (1563); Gas- 
coigne, The Steel Glass (1576); Gosson, School of Abuse 
(1579); Sidney, Defense of Poesy (1580), and Robin- 
son, Handful of Pleasant Delights ( 1 5 84). Minto, English 
Poets, Ch. iii. ; Sackville-West, The Works of Thomas 
Sackville, and Schelling, Life and Writings of George 
Gascoigne, should also be consulted. 

The years between the publication of TotteV s Miscellany 
and The Shepheardes Calender stand in the history of Eng- 
lish poetry as the era of the Courtly Makers. After the 
success of Wyatt and Surrey it became highly fashion- 
able for the gay group about the king to breathe its 
amorous woes in verse modeled after Italian lyrists. A 
few there were like Gascoigne, the author of The Steel 
Glass, and Sackville, whose contributions to the Mirror 
for Magistrates show a surprising strength, that were 
true poets, but the age as a whole deserved the taunt of 
Sidney. Poetry, he declared, " is fallen to be the laugh- 
ing-stock of children," and in summing up the achieve- 
ments of the English Muse he found at the very middle 
of Elizabeth's reign that there had been but four poets 
whose works deserved mention. He says: 

Chaucer, undoubtedly, did excellently in his Troilus and Cressida ; of 
whom, truly, I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that 
misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stum- 
blingly after him. Yet had he great wants, fit to be forgiven in so reverend 

15 

225 



226 The Foundations of English Literature 

Sidney's Literary Position A Transition Figure 

antiquity. I account the Mirror of Magistrates meetly furnished of beau- 
tiful parts ; and in the Earl of Surrey's lyrics many things tasting of a noble 
birth, and worthy of a noble mind. The Shepherd's Calendar hath much 
poetry in his eclogues, indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. 
. . . Besides these, I do not remember to have seen but few (to speak 
boldly) printed, that have poetical sinews in them. 

Sidney modestly forgets his own poetic achievements, 
but no other critic can omit them. He occupies a unique 
place in English poetry : half-way between the old and 
the new, the last of the Courtly Makers, the first of 
the Elizabethan creators, he stands a transition figure 
at the portal of the new era. As the president of the 
Areopagus he was leader of the group that would bind 
English poetry with the classic prosody ; yet his sonnet 
sequence, written after the new methods, became the 
chief inspiration of the school that opposed the old meas- 
ures. Though destined to become the typical figure of 
the Elizabethan era, he maintained at its very dawn that 
the English drama should adhere to the unities of Aris- 
totle and avoid mixing comedy and tragedy, — advice 
which if followed would have made Shakespeare and his 
school impossible, — and he died knowing nothing of 
Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Jonson, nothing of the 
Armada, nothing of the ultimate glory of the great 
sovereign whom he so zealously served. 

The era is dated from the first work of Spenser, who 
belonged wholly to the new school and who was destined 
to become one of the four great poets of the English 
race, but its opening notes were struck by Sidney. 

7. Sir Philip Sidney (1^^4.-1^86) 

Authorities, The standard life of Sidney is Fox 
Bourne, Memoir of Sir Philip Sidney, The same au- 



Sidney and Spenser 227 

Sidney's Great Fame and Small Achievement His Life 

thor's Sir Philip Sidney in Heroes of the Nations Series, 
and Symonds' Sir Philip Sidney in the Engh'sh Men of 
Letters Series, are the most serviceable works for the 
general student. The standard edition of Sidney's poems 
is Grosart's, a work indispensable to the student; but a 
good working edition is published in three volumes by 
the Scribners. See also Davis, Life and Times of Sir Philip 
Sidney ; Arber's and Cook's editions of The Defense of 
Poesy; Scribner's edition of the Arcadia ; Welsh, English 
Masterpiece Course, and Minto, Ch. iv. Sir Henry Sidney's 
letter to his son is in Arber's English Garner, Vol. i. 

Few men in all history have left so deep an impress 
upon their times with so small a showing of brilliant and 
far-reaching accomplishment as Philip Sidney. In his 
own estimation at least, his whole brief career, which 
covered indeed only the first period of Elizabeth's reign, 
was but a time of preparation. When he fell at Zutphen 
he had but just entered upon his real life-work. 

As the son of Sir Henry Sidney, Viceroy of Ireland, 
and as nephew of the powerful Earls of Warwick and 
Leicester, Sidney was early given every advantage. His 
education was carefully attended to. After several years 
at Oxford he was granted a license ** to go abroad with 
three servants and four horses," and for the next three 
years he was busy with his studies in the leading Euro- 
pean cities. He was in Paris during the massacre of St. 
Bartholomew ; he was for nine months in Frankfort, where 
he had as master the celebrated Languet ; he studied for 
eight months in Italy, and after a winter in Vienna he 
returned through the Low Countries to England to spend 
the greater part of his remaining years at the royal court. 
His ideal life was one of action ; literature was but an 
avocation, a solace for idle hours; he longed to join in 



2 28 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Typical English Hero His Contemporary Renown 

the stirring life of the times, to sail into the Northwest 
with Frobisher or to the Spanish Main with Drake, but 
the Queen gave him little chance for action. She sent 
him on an embassy to the continent, and at length made 
him Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands, but it was 
his fate to fall in his first important engagement with the 
national foe. 

With this slight record of actual achievement Sidney is 
the typical figure of a heroic age, one of the idols of the 
English nation. No man ever had a more perfect and 
lovable character, a more delightful personality. Over 
all who met him he cast a singular charm. None could 
know him and speak of him dispassionately. Queen 
Elizabeth, who was seldom mistaken in a man, declared 
him the jewel of her kingdom. William of Orange, the 
hero of the Netherlands, declared that ** her Majesty had 
in Mr. Philip Sidney one of the ripest and greatest coun- 
sellors of State that lived in Europe." His death was a 
national bereavement. ** It was accounted a sin," says 
a contemporary, ** for any gentleman of quality, for 
months after, to appear at court or city in any light or 
gaudy apparel." ** Volumes would be filled," says Fox 
Bourne, ** were I to collect all the praise uttered in prose 
and still more extensively in verse, by Sir Philip Sidney's 
contemporaries or his immediate successors." And all 
this for a youth who died at thirty-two. 

The Areopagus. It was almost inevitable that one of 
Sidney's temperament and training should be drawn 
toward literary work. As early as 1578 he had written a 
masque. The Lady of the May, to be acted before the 
Queen, and by the following year he was regarded by all 
as the foremost representative and patron of English let- 



Sidney and Spenser 229 

The Areopagus The Unsettled Nature of English Verse 

ters. Around him gathered a brilliant circle : Harvey, 
Grevil, afterwards Lord Brooke, Dyer, Spenser, and 
others, — " the Areopagus," whose function it was, in the 
words of Spenser, to proclaim " a general surceasing and 
silence of bald rhymers, and also of the very best too ; in- 
stead whereof they have by authority of their whole sen- 
ate, prescribed certain laws and rules of quantities of 
English syllables for English verse." 

It is a somewhat startling thought that scarcely ten 
years before Spenser and Shakespeare and the whole 
school of Elizabethan poets were to put forth their im- 
mortal works, it was still a debatable question whether 
the old or the new prosody was to prevail. " The an- 
cient," says Sidney, " marked the quantity of each 
syllable, and according to that framed his verse; the 
modern observing only number, with some regard to the 
accent, the chief life of it standeth in that like sounding 
of the words which we call rime. Whether of these be 
the most excellent would bear many speeches." He 
himself was inclined to compromise: ** the English," he 
declares, ** is fit for both sorts." Many of his songs and 
eclogues in the Arcadia are in the classic measures, but 
his sonnets, upon which his fame as a poet almost wholly 
rests, are in the modern form. Harvey stood uncom- 
promisingly for the old meters. What English poetry 
would have been had his counsel prevailed may be seen 
in Stanyhurst's translation of the ^neid (1582), ** one 
of the most grotesque books in the English language " 
(Arber's ed.). Spenser fell for a time under the influence 
of the Areopagus, but he soon broke away, and his work, 
together with Sidney's incomparable sonnets, set the 
standard for all later poetry. 



230 The Foundations of English Literature 

Astrophel and Stella Its Perfect Art 

Astrophel and Stella. Sidney's literary product consists 
of three works: The Defense of Poesy , the Arcadia^ a 
long romance, and Astrophel and Stella, a sonnet se- 
quence ; and the greater part of this product was written 
in the three years following 1580, ** in these my not old 
years and idlest times." In the sonnets, which are his 
supreme achievement, he was a true Courtly Maker. 
What Wyatt saw afar off Sidney accomplished. Wyatt, 
rude and unskilled, using an instrument not his own, had 
tried to voice the song in his heart, and despite his crude- 
ness and imitation we feel as we read him the thrill of an 
honest passion, deep and sad. In Sidney the thrill is 
more intense. Here we have perfect mastery of technique 
without a trace of imitation. Every sonnet deepens the 
impression that the poet had obeyed his Muse : 

Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write ; 

and that this is the record of an honest heart written 
because 

Love doth hold my hand and make me write. 

We need not search the lives of Sidney to find the facts 
as to Stella — we shall settle nothing if we do. The 
poem is enough. No one can read it through and doubt 
that the poet was 

Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show 

That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain. 

It is the full story of a hopeless passion, and it holds 
some of the most impassioned, some of the saddest, some 
of the sweetest sonnets in the language. Such sonnets 
as ** With what sad steps, O moon, thou climb'st the 



Sidney and Spenser 231 

Its Sadness and Passion Its Influence on Other Poets 

skies," and ** Come sleep! O sleep," and ** O joy too 
high for my low style to show," mark the highest sweep 
of the English love sonnet. ** As a series of sonnets," 
says Ward, ** the Astrophel and Stella poems are second 
only to Shakespeare's; as a series of love poems they 
are, perhaps, unsurpassed." 

The influence of this first sequence of sonnets was wide- 
spread and immediate. Following the publication of 
Astrophel and Stella in 1 591 there came, as we shall see, 
the greatest sonnet era in the history of English litera- 
ture. All of the early Elizabethan poets, Daniel, Drayton, 
Lodge, Chapman, Spenser, and Shakespeare, tried their 
hand at the making of sequences, and in all of their son- 
nets there is the spirit of the first master. What Sidney 
might have become had he lived to fulfil the promise of 
his young manhood it is idle to conjecture. It is enough 
to say that had Spenser or Shakespeare died at thirty- 
two they would have left not much more than he. Even 
as it is he must be reckoned with as one of the great 
influences in the history of English poetry. 

Required Reading. Spenser, "Astrophel", Astro- 
phel and Stella, Sonnets i, 23, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 39, 48, 
87, 90, 92, 107; Golden Treasury, xxxii., xlvii. Also 
"A Dirge" and "Philomela." The selections in 
Schelling, Elizabethan Lyrics are excellent, also those in 
Ward, English Poets. 

2. Edmund Spenser (1^^2-i^gg) 

Authorities. The leading authority on Spenser and 
his works is Grosart's edition of Spenser, — a somewhat 
rare book. Craik, Spenser and his Poetry ; the Globe 
edition of the. poet, edited by Morris, with a memoir by 
Hales; the Riverside edition by Professor Child; the 



232 The Foundations of English Literature 



Edmund Spenser Little Known of His Life 

Aldine edition by Collier ; and the essay by Lowell in 
Vol. iv. of his works, are indispensable authorities. The 
best working edition is the Aldine; the most satisfactory 
life of Spenser for the general student is Church's in the 
English Men of Letters Series. Fleay, Guide to Chaucer 
and Spenser ; Dowden, Transcripts and Studies ; Gum- 
mere, Selections from Spenser^ Ath. Press Series (an- 
nounced); Kitchin, Faerie Queene^ Books i. and ii. 
(Clarendon Press Series), and Philips, English Literature, 
should be consulted. For a complete bibliography, see 
Carpenter, Guide to the Study of Spenser ; Welsh, Eng- 
lish Masterpiece Course, and Winchester, Short Courses 
of Reading. 

The life of Spenser, though he lived two centuries 
nearer our own day, is well-nigh as unknown to us as that 
of Chaucer. A few dates from the Cambridge records, 
the Stationer's Register,and the State Rolls ; a few letters 
and autobiographic poems ; a few writings of contempo- 
raries, and the rest is tradition and conjecture. Elaborate 
lives have been written after the method described by 
Henry James, — " A thin soil of historical evidence is 
made to produce luxuriant flowers of deduction," — but 
through them all the poet moves as a cold, shadowy 
figure, never clearly seen, often hopelessly obscured. 
Only once or twice, as in Mother Hubberd' s Tale, Amor- 
etiiy and Epithalamion, do we seem to get near him, but 
at best we find that we have caught only a glimpse. His 
life was of a piece with his great poem, — vague and un- 
real, — and his death was of a piece with his life. " The 
whole story of his later days," says Lowell, ** has a 
strong savor of legend." 

The time and place of Spenser's birth, and the facts as 
to his family, are unrecorded, but in his poem Protha- 
lamion he speaks of 



Sidney and Spenser 233 

Biographical Facts His Acquaintance with Harvey 

Merry London, my most kindly nurse, 
That to me gavej;his life's first kindly source, 
Though from another place I take my name. 
An house of ancient fame ; 

and in a sonnet written not far from 1593, he declares 
that the past year has seemed longer to him 

Then al those fourty which my life outwent. 

On such evidence rests the birth date, 1552. The next 
that we know of Spenser is in 1569, when he was entered 
at Cambridge as a free student. Four years later he re- 
ceived the first degree, and three years later still, in 1576, 
he became master of arts and left the university. Again 
for three years we know little about him, though The 
Shepheardes Caleyider has been made by some to yield a 
full account of the period. While at Cambridge he had 
become the close friend of Gabriel Harvey, whose curious 
efforts to reform English prosody have already been 
noticed. After Spenser left the university the two 
friends seem to have carried on a voluminous correspond- 
ence, a part of which has been preserved, and from this 
it appears that Spenser some time previous to 1579 had 
gone to London to join the circle about the brilliant 
Sidney, and that the two from the first had been strongly 
drawn toward each other. The influence of the great 
courtier upon the poet was a strong one. It was Sidney, 
he declared, 

Who first my muse did lift out of the flora 
To sing his sweet delights in lowlie laies. 

To him, " the noble and vertuous gentleman, most 
worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie," Spen- 



234 The Foundations of English Literature 

Spenser in Ireland The Visit of Raleigh 

ser dedicated his maiden volume, The Shepheardes Calen- 
der ^ which, appearing in 1579, announced to the world the 
advent of a new poet. 

On the following year Spenser went to Ireland as Sec- 
retary to Lord Grey, and during the next ten years we 
lose sight of him almost altogether. In 1590 he was 
living quietly on the large estate at Kilcolman which had 
been granted him by the English government, and here 
it was that Raleigh found him, as related in Colin Clouts 
Come Home Againe, Spenser declares that one day while 

Keeping my sheepe amongst the cooly shade 

Of the green alders by the Mullaes shore, 

A strange shepheard chaunst to find me out. . , . 

He, sitting me beside in that same shade, 

Provoked me to plaie some pleasant fit ; 

And when he heard the musicke which I made, 

He found himself full greatly pleased with it. 

The music was nothing less than the first three books of 
The Faerie Queene, and after the ** Shepheard of the 
Ocean," who was none other than Raleigh, had heard it 
all 

He gan to cast great lyking to my lore, 

And great dislyking to my lucklesse lot, 
That banisht had myselfe, like wight forlore, 

Into that waste, where I was quite forgot. 
The which to leave thenceforth he counseld mee, 

Unmeet for man in whom was ought regardful!, 
And wend with him his Cynthia to see, 

Whose grace was great, and bounty most rewardfull. 

The result was a journey to London, where after reading 
his new poem to the Queen, who was delighted with it, 
he published it with due pomp in 1591, inscribed ** to the 
most high and mighty and magnificent empresse, re- 



Sidney and Spenser 235 

Publication of The Faerie Queene Minor Poems of Spenser 

nowmed for pietie, vertue, and all gratious government, 
Elizabeth, ... to live with the eternitie of her 
fame." The popularity of the poem was immediate and 
unprecedented. Spenser returned to Ireland with the 
plaudits of his countrymen, and, what was to him of 
equal importance, a goodly pension from the Queen, who 
had indeed proved " most rewardfuU." In 1594 he mar- 
ried very happily, and he celebrated the event with 
Amorettiy a sonnet sequence after the style of Sidney, and 
Epithalamiofiy the most magnificent wedding ode in the 
language. Two years later he crossed to England again 
with three more books of The Faerie Queene, which were 
published in 1596. But life at the royal court, to judge 
from his poems, was never congenial. He soon returned 
to ** the salvage soyl " which had doubtless become dear 
to him, and there he lived until the Tyrone rebellion of 
1598 destroyed his home and sent him flying into Eng- 
land to die, soon after, an obscure and untimely death. 

His Minor Poems. So completely does Spenser's i^x^r^V 
Queene overshadow his other work that, like Chaucer, he 
lives in most minds as the creator ofa_„ 'ri,.ci,».. 

^579* The Snep- 
Single poem. But it must not be for- heardes calender. 

gotten that he published during his J^^'; Daphi^da.* 
lifetime no less than eight volumes of 1595. Astrophei. 
poetry besides The Faerie Queene ; that '^EpithaTaTi^n/" 
some of these, like Complaints, for in- ^596. coiin ciouts 

■t . -i . . , . Come Home. 

stance, which contams nme long pieces, i^ge. Four Hymns. 
are sizable books, and that much of '596. Prothaiamion. 
this poetry is on a level with the best work in his great 
masterpiece. 

The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's first significant 
publication, is a series of twelve eclogues or pastorals, 



236 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Shephearde' s Calender His Pastoral Strain 

one for each month of the year. The pleasant fiction of 
poetic shepherds piping to their flocks ** on oaten quill/' 
and leading them with song and dance through flowery- 
meads and downs, a fiction as old as poetry itself, seems 
greatly to have impressed the imagination of Spenser. 
In all of his poetry to the very last he speaks of himself as 

The shepheardes boy, best knowen by that name, 

and he alludes to his poems, even to The Faerie Queene^ 
though in much of it he is enforced 

For trumpets sterne to change mine Oaten reeds, 

as pastoral lays, the pipings of his shepherd hours. To 
him it was a world of shepherds; ** * the fair Eliza ' is the 
queen of shepherds all ; her great father is Pan, the shep- 
herd's god," and all about her are shepherds, whose one 
delight it is 

to blow 
Their pipes aloud, her name to glorifie. 

With this loose thread are bound together the twelve 
poems, which otherwise differ greatly both as to subject 
and merit. Some are romantic songs full of youth and 
extravagance ; some are translations or imitations of The- 
ocritus and the Latin pastorals; some are fables and bur- 
lesques ; three of them are religious satires which show 
the poet's early bent toward Puritanism. Everywhere in 
them are manifest the exuberant fancy and extravagance 
of a youthful dreamer who knows more of Theocritus 
and Virgil than of actual life, and who believes himself 
hopelessly and delightfully in love. But notwithstanding 
this, notwithstanding the archaic affectation complained 



Sidney and Spenser 237 

A Delightful Sheaf of Verse Other Minor Poems 

of by Sidney, The Shepheardes Calender is a most remark- 
able work. The poems are full of the sweet music now 
so familiar in The Faerie Queene, and they show a sus- 
tained poetic power seldom found in a poet's first volume. 
We need not wander long among the minor poems. 
With the land of The Faerie Queene before us we are in- 
clined to view all else with impatience. But some of the 
rarest of the shorter poems must not be passed over, for 
they alone would have established their maker as a poet 
of high rank. " The satirical fable, Mother Hubberd's 
Tale of the Ape and the Fox," says one critic, ** may take 
rank with the satirical writings of Chaucer and Dryden 
for keenness of touch, for breadth of treatment, for swing 
and fiery scorn, and sustained strength of sarcasm." It 
shows us the dark side of Elizabeth's court, and it hints 
strongly at the poet's disgust at all that pertained to the 
brilliant yet hollow and uncertain life of the courtier. 
For what is life at court but 

To loose good dayes, that might be better spent ; 
To wast long nights in pensive discontent ; 
To speed to day, to be put back to morrow ; 
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow ; 
To have thy Princes grace, yet want her Peeres ; 
To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeeres ; 
To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares ; 
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires ; 
To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne, 
To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne ? 

The Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, written to Raleigh 
after Spenser's return to his Irish home, gives us another 
glimpse into the poet's heart, yet we are never sure of 
what we see, so cumbered is the tale with artificial im- 
.agery. It is in the poems that followed Spenser's mar- 



238 The Foundations of English Literature 

Colin Clouts Come Home Againe Epithalamion 

riage in 1596 that we seem to get nearest to him. The 
Amoretti, the sonnet cycle that tells in detail the whole 
history of his love affair, is full of tenderness and passion, 
though it falls far short of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, 
but the magnificent wedding ode, Epithalamion, in its 
spontaneous joy and exultation, its tenderness and truth, 
its rapt passion and its purity, stands at the head of all 
Spenser's poetry. It is the world's wedding ode, as Men- 
delssohn's great creation is the world's wedding march. 
Open it at random and note the joy, the passion, the 
sweet music. 

Now al is done ; bring home the bride againe ; 

Bring home the triumph of our victorie ; 
Bring home with you the glory of her gaine, 

With joyance bring her and with jollity. 
Never had man more joy full day then this, 

Whom heaven would heape with blis. ... 
Ring ye the bels, ye yong men of the towne ; 

And leave your wonted labors for this day : 
This day is holy ; doe ye write it downe, 

That ye forever it remember may. 

The Faerie Queene, But the minor poems of Spenser, 
however exquisite, were, after all, but recreations of his 
Muse. The real work of his life was his great allegory, 
The Faerie Queene. We know from one of Harvey's let- 
ters that the poet had begun upon this masterpiece even 
before the publication of The Shepheardes Calender, and 
we also know that he spent all the rest of his life in elabo- 
rating and extending it. The poem, therefore, stands as 
peculiarly the life-work of Spenser. The dream of his 
young manhood had taken so firm a grasp upon him that 
it ruled his whole career. The poem, even to its end, is 



Sidney and Spenser 239 

The Faerie Queene A Dream of Young Manhood 

the vision of a young man : all of its heroes are in the 
prime of youth, " full of lusty life," teeming with 
strength, eager for adventure; its heroines are all 
maidens, depicted con amorej full of life, and " faire as 
ever living wight was faire "; its atmosphere is one of 
infinite hope and boundless possibility ; its rewards and 
punishments are absolutely just, — all comes out divinely 
right. It is not hard to find what gave the young poet 
his dream and what kept his song young even to the last. 
He was but voicing the hope, the youth, the dreams of 
his young nation, now in the first flush of its manhood. 
The Faerie Queene is none other than Elizabeth, the 

Goddesse heavenly bright, 
Mirrour of grace, and majesty divine, 

Great Ladie of the greatest Isle, whose light 
Like Phoebus lamp throughout the world doth shine ; 

the magnificence, the costly furnishings, " with royal 
arras and resplendent gold," is but a reflection of the 
gorgeous court of the Queen; the monsters and miracles 
are but commonplaces when compared with the nation's 
dream of America and the unknown seas ; the knights are 
but Sidney and Raleigh in disguise; the chivalry, the 
boundless hope, the restless longing for adventure are but 
the spirit of the age. What Spenser dreamed, Drake put 
into living deeds. 

As we study the plan of The Faerie Queene and mark 
the vastness of its foundations, we are impressed first of 
all by the tremendous enthusiasm and confidence of the 
young poet who could deliberately begin such a work. 
The poem as we have it consists of six books, each divided 
into twelve long cantos, but the part that was finished is but 
a fragment of what the poet projected. We learn from the 



240 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Plan of the Poem It was Left Incomplete 

letter to Raleigh that there were to have been twelve books 
in the first part, each of which was to show forth one of 

the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath de- 
vised, the which is the purpose of these twelve books: 
which if I find to be well accepted, I may be perhaps en- 
couraged to frame the other part of politic vertues." 
" Thus we have," says Church, " but a fourth part of the 
whole of the projected work." The first three books, as 
we learn from the introductory letter, recount the ad- 
ventures of three knights: ** The first of the Knight of 
the Redcrosse, in whom I expresse Holines: the seconde 
of Sir Guyon, in whome I set foorth Temperaunce: the 
third of Britomartis, a Lady knight, in whom I picture 
Chastity." The remaining books treat respectively of 
Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. 

This element of allegory must be fully appreciated or 
The Faerie Queene will become a vast phantasmagoria of 

Kings, queenes, lords, ladies, knights, and damsels gent, 

thrown with endless confusion into a wilderness of strange 
creatures, the dreams of every race and age. No one, after 
reading Spenser's letter to Raleigh, can wander far into 
the poem without the conviction that the author's central 
purpose was didactic, almost as much as was Bunyan's in 
Pilgrim's Progress, The poem is, as Milton declares, a 
song 

Of turneys and of trophies hung. 
Of forests and enchantments drear. 
Where more is meant than meets the ear. 

Literature produced for the mere love of creating the 
beautiful was unknown in Spenser's day. The work of 
art, it was thought, must teach its lesson ; must have its 



Sidney and Spenser 241 



Its Purpose Didactic Morals to be Made Attractive for Readers 

aim clearly evident. That Spenser regarded the most 
of his works as moral exercises we have abundant evi- 
dence. He declares of his poems in Complaints that they 
are " all complaints and meditations on the world's 
vanity, verie grave and profitable." Of The Faerie 
Queene he declares that 

The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or 
noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline. Which for that I conceived 
should be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall 
fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for varietie 
of matter then for profite of the ensample. 

The fanciful creations, the teeming world of myths and 
monsters, the atmosphere of chivalry and romance, were, 
therefore, only an outward dress to render attractive cer- 
tain moral lessons. The Faerie Queene was to be a series 
of sermons on holiness, temperance, chastity, and kindred 
virtues. In the first book of the poem the allegory is 
well-nigh as evident as it is in Bunyan. The book is a 
unity, complete in itself — indeed each of the six books 
stands in reality independent of the others. The young 
knight, ** true in deede and word," who ever as he rode 
did yearn 

To prove his puissance in battell brave 
Upon his foe, a Dragon horrible and steame, 

represents a human soul just starting in the holy life. 
His foe is the arch-enemy of holiness; the plain, with its 
vague scenery and its varied life, is the world. The youth 
sets out with light heart, " led with delight," 

Joying to heare the birdes sweete harmony, 



242 The Foundations of English Literature 

Analysis of Book I. ' Its Allegory 

his companions Truth and Innocence; but soon a storm 
drives him from the narrow path. Wandering in search 
of the way he falls in with Error, whom he overcomes. 
He is deceived by Hypocrisy, who separates him from 
Truth and Innocence; is stained by Falsehood, and at 
length is almost destroyed by Pride. But by the aid 
of Truth, who at last finds him, he escapes, feeble and 
emaciated, from Pride's dungeons, only to fall in with 
Despair, who counsels suicide. Again rescued by his 
good angel, he seeks the house of Holiness, where he is 
refreshed and disciplined by Faith, Hope, and Charity, 
until at last he is ready to meet and overcome the last 
great enemy, the dragon that he had started out to de- 
stroy. The book is full of sermons, thinly concealed. 
Puritanic in their earnestness. What preacher could sur- 
pass the earnest words in Canto x, or what Puritan could 
draw a more doleful picture of the vanities of human life 
than that presented by Despair in Canto ix ? Despite 
its mythology and its sensuous beauty the poem is Pu- 
ritan at heart. There is no laughter; it is as serious 
and as earnest as Paradise Lost. 

But the allegory grows more and more obscure after 
the first book. ** Many other adventures," says the 
poet, "are intermeddled, but," he naively adds, " rather 
as accidents than intendents. As the love of Britomart, 
the overthrow of Florimell, the vertuousness of Belphoebe, 
and many the like. ' ' These accidents increase with every 
book. The poet's love of the merely beautiful, his pas- 
sion for the poetic and the romantic, tempt him constantly 
from his task. The poem becomes more and more vague 
and discursive. Having chosen his course, the poet seems 
to have had no power to hold his helm steadily to the 



Sidney and Spenser 243 

The Poet's Wanderings The Poem a Confused and Gorgeous Dream 

goal. He wanders everywhere ; we are never sure of 
where we are to go next or what we are to see. We lose 
sight of the allegory completely and surrender ourselves 
to the charm of the movement and the sweetness of the 
music. In the later books the poem is like a gorgeous 
dream. Fantastic figures come without warning, whirl 
wildly for a moment, and disappear. The tale moves 
merrily for a time; our interest is awakened, we read 
breathlessly — it is broken never to be resumed. The 
sorely tried couple Amoret and Scudamour enlist our 
sympathies. They are ever on the verge of a joyous 
meeting, but they never find each other in Spenser's tale ; 
Britomart never weds the Knight of Justice ; the fair Una 
is forsaken and forgotten. 

The poem is a vast picture gallery, unclassified, chaotic, 
teeming with treasures. Never was there such an em- 
barrassing wealth of beauty, — old masters retouched, new 
creations, sketches and studies with subjects drawn from 
every realm of imaginative art, ancient and modern: 
dragons, giants, enchanters, personified virtues and vices, 
mermaids, witches, satyrs, gods, monsters in every shape, 
enchanted castles, descents into Avernus, everywhere the 
machinery of knight-errantry, and over it all the romantic 
light of the vanishing Middle Ages. With what master 
strokes are painted such creations as the description of 
the house of Morpheus, the cave of Despair, the castle of 
Pride, the punishment of Tantalus, the song of the Mer- 
maids, the fight between Artagall and Britomart,— there 
is no end to the list. Each picture is elaborated with in- 
finite art ; we can stand and admire it indefinitely ; but 
the vastness of the collection at length confuses us. We 
wander enchanted for a time, but the very richness of the 



244 The Foundations of English Literature 

Its Exaggeration Demand of the Age for Marvelous Tales 

gallery is wearisome. To get the most from it one must 
come in the right mood, and wander at leisure. After 
the first book one may open at random,— few ever at- 
tempt to read consecutively the whole poem. 

It is an easy task to criticise The Faerie Queene, — its 
vagueness of landscape, its unreality, and exaggeration. 
Fair Una rode a beast ** more white than snow, yet she 
much whiter." Arthur's shield shone so exceeding 
bright that it dimmed the sun as if a cloud had passed. 
In Shakespeare we meet with creations that are true at 
every point to human nature. We think of them and 
talk of them as if they had been a part of our own experi- 
ence ; but in Spenser we seldom touch the earth at all. 
His creations force their unreality upon us at every step. 
But we must remember constantly Spenser's environ- 
ment. The audience for whom he wrote must be con- 
sidered. Never has a poet been allowed more license. 
The English imagination in the early Elizabethan days, 
stimulated as it was by the dreams of the new world and 
by the deeds of the sea-kings, demanded marvelous tales. 
No exaggeration could be too wild ; no landscape too un- 
real ; no adventure too improbable. It must be remem- 
bered, too, that the poem was created in a land as chaotic 
and lawless as any in The Faerie Queene. In the words 
of his biographer 

In Ireland he had before his eyes continually that dreary world which the 
poet of knight-errantry imagines. There men might in good truth travel 
long through wildernesses and "great woods" given over to the outlaw 
and the ruffian. There the avenger of wrong need seldom want for peril- 
ous adventure and the occasion for quelling the oppressor. There the 
armed and unrelenting hand of right was but too truly the only substitute 
for law. There might be found in most certain and prosaic reality, the 
ambushes, the disguises, the treacheries, the deceits and temptations, even 



Sidney and Spenser 245 

The Epic of the Wars of Elizabeth Beauties of the Poem 

the supposed witchcrafts and enchantments, against which the fairy cham- 
pions of the virtues have to be on their guard. 

Ireland was still in the Middle Ages. Everything 
around the poet kindled his imagination. His home on 
the Mulla, ** under the foote of Mole, that mountain 
hoar," on the edge of a dark forest in which lurked un- 
known terrors, was a perfect spot for the creation of a 
poem like The Faerie Queene. *' It might almost be called 
the epic of the English wars in Ireland under Elizabeth." 

The chief excellencies of Spenser are the richness and 
power of his conceptions, the sweet poetic atmosphere 
everywhere in his work, and the dreamy melody of his 
music. The story does not long hold us. When once 
we know that the lance is charmed, or the shield invin- 
cible, the tales of combat cease to be absorbing. The plot 
does not work to a climax. At times we seem to be 
making progress, but we soon discover that there is no 
fixed destination. But the mere power of the poet's 
conceptions and the sweetness of his music hold us on 
and on. What swing and force in a picture like this : 

Which when that Champion heard, with percing point 

Of pitty deare his hart was thrilled sore, 
And trembling horrour ran through every joynt 

For ruth of gentle knight so fowle forlore : 

Which shaking off, he rent that yron dore, 
With furious force, and indignation fell ; 

Where entered in, his foot could find no flore. 
But all a deepe descent, as darke as hell. 
That breathed ever forth a filthie baneful smell. 

What " dreamy, melodious softness " in the song of the 
sirens : 



246 The Foundations of English Literature 

Its Dreamy Melody Spenser a Transition Figure 

O thou fair son of gentle Faery, 

Thou art in mighty arms most magnified 

Above all knights that ever battell tried : 
O turn thy rudder hitherward awhile ! 

Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride ; 
This is the port of rest from troublous toil, 
The world's sweet inn from paine and wearisome turmoil. 

Open at random. The sweet stanzas hold you and the 
vivid pictures thrill you. Never before had it been 
dreamed that there was so much music in the English 
tongue. In Spenser's hands it became as liquid as the 
Italian. 

This, then, is Spenser. Seen in the light of his whole 
work he stands as a transition figure, one that would have 
been impossible a few years earlier or later. His great 
poem belongs, in the words of Bascom, ** in type and 
form to the tedious and dreary works of a retreating 
age." The poet stands at the opening of the new era 
but he looks dreamily backward. Shakespeare belonged 
wholly to the present. To him the past and future were 
significant only so far as they could interpret the present 
moment. Milton's eyes were fixed steadfastly on the 
future. These were the three stages of the great creative 
era. But Spenser was not lost in the past. He was 
peculiarly the product of his age. He had a message for 
his times and he looked often into the future. He was 
the first great English poet in the modern sense, and his 
work has colored all subsequent English poetry. 

Required Reading. To get an adequate conception 
of Spenser one should read at least the first book of The 
Faerie Queene. For the general student Kitchin's edition 
(Clarendon Press) and Kate M. Warren's edition are ex- 
tremely helpful. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETS 

Authorities. Palgrave, Golden Treasury ; Bullen, 
Lyrics from the Elizabethan Age, three series; Main, 
English Sonnets; Schelling, Elizabethan Lyrics (Athe- 
naeum Press Series); Garrett, Elizabethan Songs ; Bullen, 
England's Helicon ; Drake, Shakespeare and his Times ; 
Gosse, Jacobean Poets ; Arber, English Garner, which 
contains most of the sonnet cycles; Crow, Elizabethan 
Sonnet Sequences ; Chappel, Popular Music in the Olden 
Time ; Minto, English Poets ; Saintsbury, Elizabethan 
Literature. 



The Sonneteers, The suddenness of the outburst of 
lyric poetry that followed in 1591 the publication of As- 
trophel and Stella, together with its volume and its excel- 
lence, may be counted as one of the most remarkable 
phenomena in English literary history. The first rush of 
this poetic flood brought almost nothing 1592. Daniel's Delia, 
but sonnets. In the five years following constable's Diana. 

° 1593. Lodge's Philhs. 

the publication of Sidney's work no less watson's Tears of 
than sixteen sequences of sonnets, all of fh^e"n7phfrTnd'par^ 
them dedicated to some faultless maiden thenophe. Fiet- 
with a classic name, and all of them ,594 "percy'I' cceiia. 
showing more or less the influence of Drayton's idea's 

/-«• 1 1 r Ti 1* 11 Mirror. The ma- 

Sidney and of Italian models, were en- j^rity of shakes- 
tered upon the Stationer's Register, peare-s sonnets 

r^y . 1 -^ 1 11.1 written. Zepheria 

Their popularity was unbounded; they (anonymous). 
were republished, many of them, again ^595- Bamfieid'sCyn- 

. thia. Chapman's 

and again, and they soon began to take a coronet, etc. 



247 



248 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Sonnet Era Rise and Growth of the Lyric Spirit 

Barnes' A Divine among English readers the place so long 
x596!"*GrTffin's' Fides- ^^Id by the Italian and French transla- 
sa. Smith's Ohio- tions. The sonnet era was quickly fol- 
Di^eiia. ^Spenser's lowed by a burst of romantic, patriotic, 
Amoretti. ^nd miscellaneous song, until England 

was in very truth " a nest of singing birds." 

The leading causes of this outburst are not hard to dis- 
cover. Lyric poetry is almost wholly subjective. The 
poet voices his own joy or pain, his aspirations and hopes, 
his fears, his complaints, his despair. Its basis is the in- 
dividual ; it emphasizes not the mass but the unit. The 
spontaneous outpouring of lyric song in the days of Eliza- 
beth marks the rise of individual consciousness. During 
all the Middle Ages the unit had been forgotten, but now 
a new age was dawning which recognized the rights of the 
individual and listened to his complaint. But these lyrics 
are more than mere personal cries. They are voices of 
young men : on every line are stamped the passion, the 
exuberance, the extravagance of youth. They teem with 
vitality and health ; seldom is there a morbid strain or a 
minor note. Nothing could be more natural, more in- 
evitable. They are the strong voice of a young nation, 
just conscious of its power, turbulent often, reckless and 
headstrong, romantic and full of dreams, brimming over 
with hope and joy and mere sensuous delight. 

The very suddenness of the outburst may in some de- 
gree be explained. The growth of the lyric spirit had 
been a gradual one. The period between 1557 and 1591 
had been a time of growing poetic achievement. Since 
the days of Wyatt the young nobility had been educated 
in Italy and France. They knew by heart the fashion- 
able amoretti of the romance world, and they translated 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 249 

It is Considered Vulgar to Print Poems Circulated in Manuscript 

and imitated freely, but with rare exceptions they pub- 
lished nothing. It was considered vulgar to print. Says 
Puttenham in \\\^ Arte of Poetry, published in 1589: " I 
know very many notable gentlemen in the court that have 
written commendably and suppressed it again, or else 
suffered it to be published without their names to it : as 
if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned and 
to show himself amorous of any good Art." The poems 
of Raleigh, for instance, which included the magnificent 
Cynthia, declared by Spenser to be a rival to The Faerie 
Queene, were not published during Elizabethan days, and 
now only a pitiful fragment remains. The dainty manu- 
scripts of these court singers circulated among choice 
groups of friends, and it was only by accident that a son- 
net descended to the vulgarity of print. The poems of 
Wyatt and Surrey, long after the death of their makers, 
had been rescued and given to the public in TotteV s Mis- 
cellany, and their popularity, even among the common 
people, ever curious to catch a glimpse into aristocratic 
life, had tempted others to make collections. But by far 
the greater number of poems in the four miscellanies 
printed previous to 1591, and indeed in all the miscel- 
lanies, are anonymous. 

It is certain that Sidney no more wrote his Astrophel 
and Stella for the general public than he did his love let- 
ters. The book was printed almost surreptitiously by 
Nashe, who, after Sidney's death, had secured the manu- 
script and had added to it ** sundry other rare sonnets of 
divers noblemen and gentlemen." Twenty-seven of 
these ** rare sonnets" had been boldly taken from the 
manuscripts of Samuel Daniel, who, being abroad, was 
of course ignorant of the outrage. To set himself right 



250 The Foundations of English Literature 

Prejudice against Publication Gradually Overcome The Lyric Outburst 

before the world, Daniel, upon his return to England, im- 
mediately published his sonnet sequence Delias and em- 
boldened by this the poet Constable in the same year put 
forth his Diana. The fact that Spenser had given to the 
public his great allegory, that the friends of the noble 
Sidney could permit a publication of his sonnets, and 
that such men as Daniel and Constable had ** thought far 
more of their art than their nobility," gave literature all 
at once a social reputation. Publication became immedi- 
ately fashionable, and the era of the sonnet cycles was 
the result. 

The characteristics of the early sonneteers need not be 
dwelt upon. One need read only Astrophel and Stellay 
the parent of the sequences, and Amoretti, after Sidney's 
the most poetic of them all, to understand the whole 
series. The rest are but variations more or less excellent. 

The Lyric Era (i 591-1625). When we examine the 
collections of early EngHsh lyrics we find that by far the 
greater number of them were produced during a single 
generation. It was the most fruitful era of song that 
England has ever known, and yet the lyric was only one 
phase of the poetic activity of the age. After the episode 
of the sonnet sequences, lyric song became to a large de- 
gree sporadic in its production. Almost all of the Eliza- 
bethans, even the practical and prosaic Bacon, tried at 
one time or another their skill at the lyric pipe. The 
inditing of songs became the avocation of poets. Every- 
where we find them, — little love strains, artless and im- 
passioned, rollicking songs, madrigals, and merry dances. 
We find them prefaced to the publications of the period ; 
we find them written by diamond on window-panes; we 
rescue them from ponderous books of verse where they 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 251 

Briefness of the Lyric Era Extent and Excellence of the Poetic Product 

lie crushed like dainty flowers; and everywhere through 
the great mass of tragedy and comedy they sparkle mer- 
rily Hke the gems that they are. But in an age distinc- 
tively lyrical we find no distinctively lyrical master; no 
one who, like Herrick in later days, was nothing if not a 
singer. The most exquisite of the songs were made by 
poets who were but incidentally lyrists, like Shakespeare 
and Dekker and Greene. 

The lyric era was surprisingly brief. " By the year 
162^,*' says Schelling, " almost every lyrist of importance 
who had written in the reign of Elizabeth, had either 
completed his best work or ceased altogether to write." 
But the poetic product was by no means small. The very 
abundance of material is positively embarrassing. One 
is well-nigh forced into silence by the very vastness of the 
field, for the various collections from this period " repre- 
sent," says Saintsbury, " such a body of verse as prob- 
ably could not be got together, with the same origin and 
circumstances, in any quarter-century of any nation's 
history since the foundation of the world." While there 
is much that is inferior and even worthless, the average, 
measured by any standard, is surprisingly high ; and there 
are in the collection not a few lyrics that rank with the 
brightest gems of the world's literature. 

Required Readings. The very least that a student 
may read are the lyrics of the era in T/ie Golden Treasury. 
Every one, if possible, should read through such a collec- 
tion as Schelling' s Elizabethan Lyrics (Ath. Press). 

Popular Ballads. Nor was the lyric impulse confined 
to the upper classes. It was an era prolific in what Put- 
tenham describes as ** vulgar makings." Music was 
everywhere. ** The England of Elizabeth," says Gum- 



252 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Popular Ballads Vast Numbers Written 

mere, who bases the statement upon Chappell, "surpassed 
both Italy and France in the matter of music. High and 
low, every one loved to sing; every one was expected to 
take part, even in difficult songs; and the very barber 
kept in his shop lute, cittern, or virginal for the amuse- 
ment of waiting customers. Music was everywhere and 
everywhere were songs.'* Many of the ballads in our 
modern collections — simple and stirring, full of the odor 
of the vague past, relics of the old native minstrelsy — were 
made at this time. It was the golden age of the was- 
sailing song, the merry dancing strain, and the ballad of 
current happenings. Every event in an era that teemed 
with great deeds was put into ballad form to be hawked 
about the London streets and sung at every convivial 
gathering. Shakespeare sends us for songs " old and 
plain " to 

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun. 

The ballad filled in a way the place now occupied by the 
daily paper. No happening was too trivial for its notice ; 
** Scarce a cat can look out of a gutter," says an old 
writer, " but presently a proper new ballet of a strange 
sight is indited." That the greater part of such poetry 
should be worthless was inevitable, yet here and there in 
the mass of faded and dusty broadsides that have come 
down to us there is a true ballad worth a hundred Italian- 
ate sonnets. Without this popular note the literature of 
the age of Elizabeth would have been almost wholly 
aristocratic. 

Required Readings. ** Captain Car," ** The Baron 
of Brackley," ** Young Waters," etc., Gummere, Old 
English Ballads. 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 253 

Other Poetic Products Difficulty of Classification 

Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets. But by far the leading 
poetic product of the age, in mass at least, remains to be 
considered. After the great success of Spenser it was 
believed that to attain a permanent literary fame one 
must produce a long poem. The early dramatists were 
all poets. The drama was as yet uncertain ; its produc- 
tion was simply a matter of business; often it required 
but a working over of old material, and furthermore it 
catered only to the passing hour; but true poetry was for 
all time. Thus Shakespeare expended the greatest care 
upon his long romantic poems Venus and Adonis and 
Lucrece^ and Marlowe sought to make his fame secure 
with the sweet and sensuous Hero and Leander. It was 
a time of vast poetic attempts like the Albion s England 
of Warner, which endeavored to tell in verse the entire 
history of Britain from the creation of the world ; and the 
Civil Wars of Daniel, and the huge Polyolbion of Drayton. 

To classify this vast mass of poetry, beginning with 
lyrics and running down the whole poetic gamut, has been 
often attempted. Brooke detects three divisions, " each 
corresponding to phases in the growth of the Elizabethan 
mind.'* The lyric outburst marks the period of eager 
youth ; the patriotic era with its histories and its great 
interest in England's past, marks the time of maturity; 
while the last phase, the era of philosophic and reflective 
poems, denotes the time of old age and decline. Such a 
generalization, though based upon the truth, is at best 
but vague and unpractical. All three varieties of poetry 
were making at the same time. The satires and funeral 
elegies of Donne were contemporaneous with Spenser 
and the first lyric outburst. In so short a period lines 
cannot be drawn with precision. It is better with Gosse 



254 The Foundations of English Literature 

Two General Periods Typical Poets 

to make an arbitrary division at the death of EHzabeth, 
and form only two general periods, the Elizabethan and 
the Jacobean. While there is no literary reason why 
1603 should be chosen, yet a comparison of the poetry 
produced ten years before this date with that produced 
ten years later shows, if we examine the whole poetic 
product, that a marked change had taken place, and the 
date seems to be a convenient dividing line. 

The period of lyric inspiration reached its culminating 
point in 1600 with the publication of England' s Helicon ^ 
** one of the richest and most inspired collections of mis- 
cellaneous verse ever published in any country or at any 
time." From this point the early lyrists began to drop 
off one by one and English poetry became more and more 
serious, until at length it could even ridicule the pastoral 
sweetness and extravagance of the first singers. Of the 
distinctly Elizabethan poets, Sidney and Spenser are the 
most perfect types; of the Jacobean group, Donne is 
doubtless the best representative. Two other poets, 
Drayton and Daniel, are also typical figures, since their 
work belongs to both periods. Beginning at the very 
dawn of the lyric era they worked through nearly the 
whole reign of James, and illustrated in their poetry 
almost every phase of Elizabethan and Jacobean song. 

I. Samuel Daniel ( i^62-i6ig) 

'• The well-languaged Daniel." 

Authorities. The complete works of the poet are not 
easily accessible to all students. They are included in 
Chalmers' British Poets, and there is a complete edition 
by Grosart. The Delia cycle of sonnets is reprinted in 
Arber, English Garner , Vol. iii. 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 255 

Stormy and Eventful Lives of the Early Poets Samuel Daniel 

The Hves of nearly all of the Elizabethan poets were 
stormy and eventful. They were a restless, impetuous 
group of young men who plunged eagerly into the activi- 
ties of a most active age. We read the romances of 
Lodge, and know that they were written in the Straits of 
Magellan, and that ** every line was wet with a surge, and 
every humorous passion counter-checked with a storm." 
We wander with Raleigh in desperate adventure on the 
Spanish Main or in the Irish wilds; we follow Southwell 
on his hazardous mission that brought him to the rack 
and the scaffold; we ** trail a pike " with Churchyard in 
the English wars ; we follow into exile the unhappy Con- 
stable, and we mark the steps of that wild crew which, 
headed by Marlowe and Greene, held high revelry in the 
London inns. 

Among such a throng the gentle Daniel, " right minded 
and right hearted," the Wordsworth of the Elizabethans, 
seems singularly out of place. As we read his smooth 
lines, his gentle meditations and moralizings, we seem to 
have wandered into the next century. In him we find 
the first signs of decadence, " the first example of poetry 
beginning to wither on the bough." 

The work of Daniel shows every phase of poetic change 
from the first youth of the creative era to its moralizing 
old age. His earliest work is purely Elizabethan. He 
caught the exultation, the rapture, of the first lyric out- 
burst. His Delia, the second of the sonnet cycles, con- 
tains some of the finest work of the period ; indeed, 
the 45th of the series, ** Care charmer sleep," is one of 
the few perfect sonnets in the language. The exhilara- 
tion of the great era seems for a time to have intoxi- 
cated him: 



256 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Attempt to Make a Great English Epic Daniel's Attempt 

The pulse of England never more did beat 
So strong as now ; nor ever were our hearts 

Let out to hopes so spacious and so great 
As now they are. 

The spirit of intense patriotism was upon him as it was 
upon so many of the young poets of the time. England 
had awakened to a realization of her own great past, and 
her poets longed, like Warner, 

To write the gestes of Britons stout, 
And actes of English men. 

England must have an epic commensurate with her glory, 
and native both in theme and scene. We have only to 
glance through (Hfe is too short to read them entire) such 
ponderous works as Warner's Albion s England, Daniel's 
Civil Wars between Lancaster and York, and Drayton's 
Barons' Wars and Polyolbion to realize fully the spirit of 
boundless enthusiasm and of unlimited ambition that 
filled the " spacious times of great Elizabeth." There 
is but one parallel in literary history, and that is where, in 
the early years of the American republic, Joel Barlow by 
sheer force tried to create an epic that should be com- 
mensurate with the hope and the glory of America. But 
Daniel's vast poem is not now counted with the great 
epics; no one reads it. It has little movement and 
almost no poetic fire. The poet moves leisurely, tracing 
at length the causes of the great drama, dwelling upon 
the actors, omitting all battle-scenes, all spirited action, 
and moralizing freely, until at last, just before the battle 
of Tewkesbury, he drops his pen as if weary himself of the 
interminable tale. But the poem is far from being worth- 
less. Its limpid lines, its ease and grace, its gentle, con- 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 257 

His Contemplative Verse An Elizabethan Wordsworth 

templative atmosphere, are almost enough to balance its 
great defects. 

When the poet, putting aside his epic tale, devoted 
himself to purely contemplative verse he did by far his 
most charming work. In Musophilus, in Hymen s Tri- 
umph, and the Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland we 
seem to get close to the poet's heart. One has to read 
but little from these poems, especially from the Epistle, 
to know the sweet contemplative nature of the man, and 
to realize why he stole away from the royal court where 
he so long had been a favorite, to spend the autumn of 
his days in the seclusion of the country. A single stanza 
of the Epistle throws more light upon the poet's nature 
than would a whole chapter of commentary. 

Daniel is not a great figure among the Elizabethan 
poets, but the sweetness and strength of his style and 
the gentle meditative atmosphere of his poems give 
him a peculiar charm. Coleridge was delighted with 
the old poet. " Read Daniel," was his advice, ** the 
admirable Daniel," and other poets and critics have 
heartily concurred. Lowell's criticism is a very happy 
one. 

Writing two hundred and fifty years ago, he stands in no need of a 
glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and not more turns of 
phrase, in his works, that have become obsolete. This certainly indicates 
both remarkable taste and equally remarkable judgment. There is a 
conscious dignity in his thought and sentiment such as we rarely meet. 
His best poems always remind me of a table-land, where, because all is so 
level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a plane we are standing. I think 
his Musophilus the best poem of its kind in the language. The reflections 
are natural, the expression condensed, the thought weighty, and the lan- 
guage worthy of it. But he wasted himself on an historical poem, in which 
the characters were incapable of that remoteness from ordinary associations 
which is essential to the ideal. 
17 



258 The Foundations of English Literature 

Michael Drayton A Versatile and Voluminous Writer 

Required Reading. The student should read the 
selections in The Golden Treasury ^ Schelling, Elizabethan 
Lyrics^ and Ward, English Poets, 

2, Michael Drayton (i^6j-i6ji) 

Authorities. Chalmers' British Poets of course includes 
Drayton. The most accessible edition of Drayton's 
poetical works is that in the Library of Old Authors, 3 
vols. The most recent edition of the poet's works is 
Hooper's (not yet complete). Vol. vi. of the English 
Garner contains the Idea sequence. 

If Daniel's poetry in tone and finish is prevailingly 
Jacobean, an echo of the decadent days of the great song 
era, Drayton's enormous mass of verse is almost purely 
Elizabethan. Though his life was divided into two dis- 
tinct poetic periods by the accession of James, and though 
he lived well into the reign of Charles I., his work never 
lost the force and fire of the first lyric outburst. In the 
first days of his rejection by James he was inclined to be 
satirical, but the prevailing tone of his work to the very 
last is wholly Elizabethan, full of the hope, the patriot- 
ism, the spontaneous enthusiasm of the early days. 

Drayton was undoubtedly the most versatile and volu- 
minous of all the English poets. As we enter the vast 
wilderness of his published work and note the amazing 
variety of his subjects and forms, we are at first confused. 
How shall we classify this enormous producer who entered 
almost every realm of poetic art ? Religious poems, 
biblical paraphrases, sonnets and lyrics in every key, 
pastorals and eclogues modeled after Spenser, heroic 
epistles after Ovid, rhyming chronicles, epics, satires, 
fantasies and extravaganzas, martial songs and ballads 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 259 

Vastness of His Poetic Product His Life 

— what has he not attempted ? And it was no middle 
flight that he would make. He completed no less than 
five epics with themes ranging from the miracles of 
Moses to legends of Robert of Normandy and chroni- 
cles of the days of Edward II. Nor are any of these 
poems noted for their brevity. Lowell declares that 
Polyolbion is the ** plesiosaurus of verse." The pub- 
lished works of the poet contain, according to Craik, 
nearly one hundred thousand lines, or a bulk ten times 
as great as Paradise Lost. 

Of the life of Drayton we know but little. Like 
Shakespeare, he was a native of Warwickshire ; he is sup- 
posed to have been a student at Oxford ; and some time 
previous to 1591 he went to London, where in six years 
he published no less than eight volumes of poetry. He 
secured the patronage of several noble families and 
was honored by Elizabeth, but being rejected by James 
he retired into seclusion. He was soon befriended, how- 
ever, by the Earl of Dorset, who took him into his own 
home and enabled him to devote his last years uninter- 
ruptedly to poetry. 

The first period of Drayton's literary career resembles 
in many respects that of his contemporary and friend, 
Daniel. He contributed his book of sonnets, he wrote 
his pastorals and songs, and he had his time of patriotic 
exaltation, the most notable fruit of which was The Bar- 
ons' Wars. This teeming and exultant period seems 
to have been followed by one of inactivity, but the inter- 
val of unproductiveness was a short one; his last period, 
which opened with the accession of James, was one of 
almost constant publication. During these years the 
poet, without Hterary incentive save his own caprice, 



26o The Foundations of English Literature 

His Poems the Recreations of a True Poet His Martial Ballad Agincourt 

allowed his Muse to wander at will. Hence the variety, 
the fanciful nature, the strength, of his later creations. 
They are the dreams and the poetic recreations of a poet 
who, no longer anxious about material things, and sure 
of his inspiration, wandered at his own sweet will. 

Drayton's sonnets, though by no means inferior, would 
not be mentioned were it not that among them is one of 
the few great sonnets of all literature, the ** Since there 's 
no hope," a gem so pure that many have questioned its 
authorship. His historical poems far surpass those of 
Daniel. They have more vigor and movement than 
those of the gentle poet. Drayton delighted in action ; 
he was rough and daring, and he filled his lines with the 
old English fire. Of his later work his ballad Agincourt, 
universally rated as the best martial lyric in the language, 
stands conspicuous. No one who has in his veins a drop 
of English blood can read its ringing stanzas without a 
thrill of the old Saxon war spirit : 

When down their bows they threw, 
And forth their bilbows drew, 
And on the French they flew : 

No man was tardy, 
Arms from the shoulders sent, 
Scalps to the teeth were rent, 
Down the French peasants went, 

These men were hardy. 

The lines are like a trumpet. And the wonder is that the 
penner of this poem that, as Lowell says, runs and leaps, 
* ' clashing its verses like swords upon bucklers, ' ' could also 
write Nymphidia, a dainty song of Queen Mab and fairy 
land, as fanciful as the Midsummer Nighf s Dream and 
as exquisite in its settings as Drake's Culprit Fay, 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 261 

His Nymphidia His Polyolbion an Inspired Guidebook 

Upon a grasshopper they got, 

And what with amble and with trot, 

For hedge nor ditch they spared not, 

But after her they hied them ; 
A cobweb over them they throw, 
To shield the wind if it should blow ; 
Themselves they wisely could bestow 

Least any should espy them. 

But to compare these agile and perfect lyrics with the 
ponderous, unwieldy Polyolbion is indeed to reach a 
climax. The task that the poet set for himself was 
simply to write in alexandrines " A chorographical de- 
scription of all the tracts, rivers, mountains, forests, and 
other parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britain ; with 
intermixture of the most remarkable stories, antiquities, 
wonders . . . of the same." It is the poetic Dooms- 
day Book of England. And yet the subject was not an 
unpoetic one. To celebrate the beauties and tell the 
legends of English hills and streams was an eminently 
poetic task. It is only the attempt to celebrate all the 
natural beauties of the island that lays the poem open to 
criticism. But despite this the poet was equal to his 
task. One has but to read a dozen pages of this in- 
spired guidebook to realize that it is full of beautiful 
descriptions and charmingly told episodes. When the 
poet reaches his native soil, when 

Upon the mid-lands now the industrious muse doth fall. 
That shire which we the heart of England well may call, 

he is at his best. The picture is traced with loving care. 
Charles Lamb was delighted with the poem. ** He has 
gone over the soil," he declared, " with the fidelity of a 
herald and the painful love of a son ; he has not left a 



262 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Doomsday Book of English Poetry John Donne 

rivulet, so narrow that it may be stepped over, without 
honorable mention, and has animated streams with life 
and passion above the dreams of old mythology." But 
the vast extent of the poem repels readers. It doubtless 
will never be read save in selections. 

There are other sides of Drayton upon which we cannot 
dwell. His achievements were so many that at best one 
can hope to treat only the most typical. He was not a 
poet of the highest rank; he was in no sense an inspired 
singer; and yet of the small group of Elizabethans who 
devoted their powers wholly to poetry, Drayton, after 
Spenser, is undoubtedly the most conspicuous figure. 

Required Reading. ** Since there's no help," Agin- 
court, and Nymphidia. The selections in Ward, Eng- 
lish PoetSy and Schelling, Elizabethan LyricSy should be 
read. 

J. John Donne (i^yj-i6ji) 

Authorities. The life of Donne by Izaak Walton 
(Bohn), a charming book, is the chief source of informa- 
tion about the poet; Dr. Johnson's sketch in Lives of the 
Poets (Bohn) should be read with caution. The best re- 
cent life of Donne is Jessop's in English Religious 
Leaders Series; the most helpful edition of his poems is 
that by Chambers and Saintsbury in The Musers' Li- 
brary; the edition of Donne in the Riverside British 
Poets is also valuable. Gosse, Life and Letters of Dr, 
John Donne (announced). 

The place of John Donne in the history of Elizabethan 
poetry has never been fully settled. No other poet of 
the age has been so variously estimated. Dryden and 
Dr. Johnson considered him the founder of the ** meta- 
physical school of poets," the chief characteristics of 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 263 

Varying Estimates of Donne He was Not a Culmination 

whose work were " unnatural and far-fetched conceits," 
** enormous and disgusting hyperboles," ** violent and 
unnatural fictions," ** slight and trifling sentiments." 
Of late years there have been critics, notably Dowden 
and Minto, who would dismiss the whole metaphysical 
school as a myth, and who see in the poems of Donne 
only the vagaries common to the court poetry of the 
age. What Tudor courtier, they ask, was not full of 
conceits and crotchets, of artificial sentiments and striv- 
ings after effect ? The poetry of Donne could not mark 
the old age of the poetic era, since nearly all of it was 
written when the first chorus of Elizabethan singers was 
in full voice. To sustain the theory, he should have 
written at the end of the period, in the sad afternoon that 
followed the glad morning of Spenser and Marlowe and 
Shakespeare. 

The theory that the great poetic period went through 
certain well-defined phases, commencing with joyous 
and spontaneous song and ending with moralizings and 
metaphysics, cannot for a moment be maintained. But 
while we may dismiss this idea of progressive develop- 
ment during the short poetic period, we cannot read 
through the poems of Donne without feeling that in them 
is something radically different froni anything in the 
works of his contemporaries or predecessors. We are 
impressed first of all by the melancholy, half-morbid note 
that dominates nearly all his poems and persists as an 
undertone through them all. Even when he is most gay 
and spontaneous we detect two tones, — 

The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove. 

It is like the slow strokes of a knell echoing through the 



264 The Foundations of English Literature 

The First Decadent Figure A Melancholy and Morbid Poet 

joyous air of a June morning; like a branch of yellow 
leaves amid the springtime blossoms, a hint of the coming 
autumn days. The sight of a lovely maiden sets the poet 
to thinking of the grave ; a summer rose, instead of filling 
him with rapturous delight, sets him to moralizing : 

Little think'st thou, poor flower, 

"Whom I have watched six or seven days. 

And seen thy birth, and seen that every hour 
Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise, 

And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough — 

Little think'st thou 

That it will freeze anon and that I shall 
To-morrow find thee fallen, or not at all. 

In everything he was serious and sad, — sad even to mel- 
ancholy and morbidness. He wrote a work in praise of 
suicide; he composed a book of funeral elegies; in his 
last hours he wrapped himself in his shroud to have his 
portrait painted with closed eyes and ghastly face. 

It is easy to misrepresent Donne by dwelling on one 
phase of his many-sided character, but at whatever angle 
we view his poetry we find the melancholy and moraliz- 
ing tendency predominant. The lyrists, like Greene, 
and Marlowe, and Lyly, were an unpractical set, who 
went into ecstasies over beauty and stopped not to think 
beyond the present moment, but Donne was meditative 
and speculative. Even Dowden admits that his songs 
deal with " the metaphysics and casuistry of love." 
Think of Greene and Marlowe opening a love-song with 

Stand still and I will read to thee 
A lecture. Love, in love's philosophy. 

When poets begin to moralize and seek the scientific 
basis of their passion they cease to be poets ; they have 



The Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 265 

An Autumn Note in Midsummer Two Periods in Donne's Life 

become mere psychologists. " Every art," says Taine, 
" ends in a science." Donne, and to a less degree 
Daniel, was the first symptom of the decline of the great 
poetic period. Often at midsummer, and even in June, 
one may hear a single mournful cricket, the first note in 
the chorus of the coming autumn. 

The life of Donne is divided sharply into two periods. 
When at the age of forty he entered the Church, to be- 
come six years later Dean of St. Paul's, he left behind 
him a wild and checkered youth, to enter upon a career 
conspicuous in English church history for its rapt spiritual 
exaltation and its wide-spread influence. Of Dr. Donne, 
the great preacher, we shall not speak; it is ** Jack" 
Donne whose life concerns us, since nearly all of his 
poems were written before he entered the ministry. 
When he entered upon his new life he is said to have 
wished that all his poems might be destroyed. 

Donne's early life is admirably summed by Professor 
Dowden : 

Papist and Protestant ; doubter and believer ; a seeker for faith and one 
who amused himself with skeptical paradoxes ; a solitary thinker on obscur- 
est problems and " a great visitor of ladies," as Sir Richard Baker describes 
him, "a great frequenter of plays"; a passionate student longing for 
action ; a reader of the law ; a toiler among folios of theology ; a poet and 
a soldier ; one who communed with lust and with death ; a courtier and a 
satirist of the court ; a wanderer over Europe and one who lay inactive in 
a sullen weedy lake without space for stroke of arms or legs — such was 
Donne up to his fortieth year. 

His poetic product was small, ludicrously so when com- 
pared with the work of a poet like Drayton. He did not 
write for publication. His verses were ** intended for 
the delight and amusement of a small circle." It was 



266 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Influence on Later Writers The First of the Metaphysical Poets 

not until after his death that his poems were collected 
and published. 

The great influence of Donne upon later English 
poetry cannot be overlooked. His example, beyond a 
doubt, helped to turn the current of English poetry into 
the fantastic channels which it occupied during the 
middle of the century. Cowley and Waller, Suckling 
and Cleveland, and indeed the whole group of artificial 
rhymers who wrote from the intellect rather than from 
the heart, and who represent the autumn of the great 
creative era, were but copying the vagaries and blemishes 
of this early poet, neglecting utterly the inspired portions 
of his work, the frequent lines that glow with the true 
Elizabethan fire. 

Required Readings. For a marked example of his 
metaphysical side, which traces ** resemblances that are 
fantastic or uncalled-for or unseemly," read ** The Flea " 
or ** A Valediction of my Name." Among his best 
songs are " Sweetest Love, I do not go," ** Love's 
Deity," "The Message," " Go Catch a Falling Star," 
"The Dream." See Go/den Treasury ^ Schelling, Elizq,- 
bethan Lyrics^ and Ward, English Poets, 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE TRANSITION TO FINISHED PROSE 

The Rise of the Novel 

Authorities. Jusserand, The English Novel in the 
Time of SJiakespeare ; Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction ; 
Raleigh, The English Novel ; Tuckerman, History of 
English Prose Fiction; Lanier, The English Novel; Si- 
monds. Introduction to English Prose Fiction ; Warren, 
History of the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Century. 

To understand fully the Elizabethan age one must 
realize that it was the breaking upon England of the 
Italian Renaissance a full century after it had reached its 
highest point in Southern Europe. The genuine enthu- 
siasm, the marvelous genius, the honest religious devotion 
of the early days, had long passed from Italy. There were 
no more Dantes and Michel Angelos and Savonarolas. 
Italy had become corrupt in morals and decadent in art 
and literature, and it was this degenerate Italy that now 
took possession of England. The school of the new 
learning, which had endeavored to model itself on the 
purest and best of the Italian culture, had become but a 
tradition. The young men of the English nobility were 
flocking to the new Italy, to return, as Ascham declared, 
** worse transformed than were any of Circes court." 
The gayety and lightness, the pomp and extravagance, 
the fantastic style of architecture and costume, the 
artificial life, the inflated conversation, — indeed all the 
strivings of the age to achieve ** nothing but what was 

267 



268 The Foundations of English Literature 

Translations from the Italian Native Imitations of Italian Novels 

brilliant, unexpected, extraordinary," — all this came out 
of Italy. 

Of the tide of translations from the Italian that poured 
into England during the first twenty years of Elizabeth's 
reign the greater part consisted of novels and amorous 
tales, which old Ascham, who stands as a solitary figure 
between the old and the new, declared to be full of 
abominations. ** Ten Morte d' Arthurs do not the tenth 
part so much harme as one of these bookes made in 
ItaHe and translated in England." Works like Boccac- 
cio's Amorous Fiametta, ** wherein is sette downe a 
catalogue of all and singular passions of love," like Cas- 
tiglione's Courtier^ which contains " lengthy precepts 
concerning assignations and lovemaking," like Painter's 
Pallace of Pleasure^ Fenton's Tragicall Discourses, and 
Whetstone's Heptameron of Civill Discourses^ became 
before the end of Elizabeth's reign the chief literary diet 
of the reading class. They were highly fashionable ; no 
lady's table was complete without the latest issues. The 
moralists and the Puritans might thunder against them, 
it made little difference. ** They were found," says Jus- 
serand, ** not only * in every shop ' but in every house; 
translations of them were the daily reading of Shake- 
speare, and they had an immense influence not only in 
emancipating the genius of the dramatists of the period, 
but, what was of equal importance, in preparing an 
audience for them." 

That a school of native novelists should follow fast 
upon the heels of the Italian translators was inevitable. 
No sooner was it realized that the new literary form had 
taken a fast hold upon fashionable reading circles than 
English writers began in earnest to supply the demand 



The Transition to Finished Prose 269 

The Advent of John Lyly His Compromise between Prose and Poetry 

with a native product. The earliest of all was John 
Lyly, whose Euphues^ published in the same year as 
Spenser's Shepheardes Calender^ marks an epoch not only 
in the history of the English novel but of English prose. 
The age was preeminently poetic. Prose had made little 
progress ; it was not yet recognized as a form capable of 
artistic treatment. The writings of the great reformers, 
like Tyndale and Latimer, had been marked by perfect 
simplicity and naturalness. They were the words of 
men inspired by a message; they were as unstudied as 
the talk of the street ; they had not a trace of art ; they 
were poured out spontaneously like the first outburst of 
lyric song. But the new school of novelists, when sud- 
denly called upon to express themselves in prose, pro- 
duced a form that is not prose at all when compared 
with the work of Latimer. Lyly and Sidney and Greene 
were poets, and their prose was but a single step away 
from poetry; Sidney even believed that his Arcadia was 
a poem. The balancing and alliteration and antithesis, 
the brilliancy and the ornamentation of the work of these 
novelists, combine to make up a literary form which in 
externals at least is as near poetry as prose can ever get. 
Euphuism and Arcadianism mark the point of the firsv 
transition from poetry to classic prose. 

Lyly was followed by Sidney, Greene, Lodge, Nash, 
and others, who form a distinct literary group. Their 
novels quickly surpassed in popularity the translations 
from the Italian writers. They wrote largely for the 
fashionable and the wealthy, for cultured ladies, who 
then, as now, were the arbiters of literary success, and 
their novels, though to-day they seem like mere paste 
and tinsel, were the most successful products of their age. 



270 The Foundations of English Literature 

Life of John Lyly His Ambition for Court Preferment 

I. John Lyly (1^53-1606) 

" The witty, comical, facetiously quick, and unparalleled John Lyly." 

Authorities, The best text of Euphues is Arber's re- 
print ; the most serviceable and accessible study of Lyly's 
life is that prefixed to Baker's edition of Endymion, in 
which there is a full bibliography ; the best discussions 
of euphuism are in Jusserand, English Novel in the Time 
of Shakespeare^ Morley, Vol. viii., and Euphuism, by 
J. M. Hart. 

Few lives, even of Elizabethan writers, are more com- 
pletely veiled in obscurity than that of John Lyly. Be- 
fore his entrance at Magdalene College, Oxford, in 1569, 
very little is known of him, and after that date even until 
the publication of Euphues, which brought him into sud- 
den prominence, the known facts of his life reduce to a 
single mention in Wood's History of Oxford (1674). He 
was 

always adverse [says Wood] to the crabbed studies of logic and philosophy. 
For so it was that his genie being naturally bent to the pleasant paths of 
poetry, did in a manner neglect academical studies, yet not so much but 
that he took the degrees in arts, that of master being compleated 1575. At 
which time, as he was esteemed at the university a noted wit, so afterwards 
was at the court of Queen Elizabeth, where he was also reputed a rare poet, 
witty, comical, and facetious. 

Even after his great success we find the records of his 
life singularly fragmentary. His literary industry was 
unceasing: novels, poems, dramas, pamphlets, flowed 
from his pen ; he was a leader in literary circles, he was 
the popular writer of his day, but the great ambition of 
his life remained ungratified. He longed for preferment 
at court. For thirteen years he lived in constant ex- 
pectation of gaining the mastership of the revels, but his 



The Transition to Finished Prose 271 

His Euphues A Book for Fashionable Ladies 

hopes were doomed to disappointment. He became a 
mere hanger-on at court, a perfect example of Spenser's 
picture of the expectant courtier, a pathetic figure grow- 
ing more and more hopeless until at length he passes out 
of sight altogether. The last ten years of his life are 
almost completely unknown. 

Lyly's first book, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, 1579, 
was followed the next year by Euphues and his England, 
which was in reality only the completion of the earlier 
volume. The plot is a mere shadow, well-nigh lost amid 
a chaos of disquisitions chiefly sentimental. Euphues, an 
Athenian, journeys to Naples and finally to England, but 
his progress is marked not by happenings but by dis- 
courses and moralizings. It was a book with a purpose 
as much as was The Faerie Qiieene, It would set forth 
** the delights that wit foUoweth in his youth by the 
pleasantness of Love and the happiness he reapeth in 
age by the perfectness of Wisdom." It was written con- 
fessedly for ladies. " Euphues," declared Lyly in his 
Preface " To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of England," 
** had rather laye shut in a Ladyes casket then open in a 
schollers studie." He was modest in his demands: ** It 
resteth Ladies, that you take the paines to read it, but 
at such times, as you spend in playing with your little 
Dogges, and yet will I not pinch you of that pastime, 
for I am content that your Dogges lye in your laps: so 
Euphues may be in your hands, that when you shall be 
wearie of the one, you may be ready to sport with the 
other." The book is dreary enough reading to-day. 
The constant moralizing, the endless analogies, the 
plethora of fantastic similes, the " wire-drawn distinc- 
tions," the monstrous natural history which speaks 



272 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Nature of Euphuism Its Influence on Other Writers 

volumes concerning the scientific attainments of the 
Elizabethans, the never-ending citation of parallel cases 
from classic lore, and the inflated and artificial style 
place it in another world from the novels of to-day ; but 
to the audience for whom it was written it was the acme 
of brilliancy and wit. While its vogue lasted it was the 
most successful of books ; it went through no less than 
six editions in two years. 

The style of Euphues, which has been much discussed 
and much misunderstood, need not detain us. It was 
not invented by Lyly ; it was only one variation of the 
artificial manner in use by the Italians and their imitators. 
Lyly undoubtedly borrowed it from Guevara, a Spanish 
romancer who had been translated by Lord Berners. Its 
leading characteristic is its extreme use of antithesis and 
balanced structure embellished by alliteration. Euphues, 
for instance, was a " young gallant of more witte than 
wealth and yet of more wealth than wisdom." The 
vogue of the style was a short one ; it was out of fashion 
before 1590, and, aside from a few of the novelists like 
Greene and Lodge, none of the writers of the age were 
affected by it. The whole episode of Euphuism might 
be dismissed as a mere passing fad were it not that it 
indicated a new trend in the direction of English prose. 
Professor Baker has admirably summed up its influence. 

No student of the growth of English prose from Ascham to Bunyan can 
doubt that even as a youth gains suppleness, grace, quickness, and sureness 
of movement from the severe exercises of the gymnasium, in like manner 
English prose gained something from the temporary success of Euphuism 
between 1580 and 1590. The careful study of words, of their values in 
sound and in meaning, meant a better understanding of the scope of the 
English language, of its possibilities, English prose must have come forth 
from the period of Ephuism more supple, with a better knowledge of its 



The Transition to Finished Prose 273 

Lyly Neglects his Opportunity Robert Greene 

own strength and of the methods by which any weakness in it as a means of 
literary expression might be overcome. The contribution of Euphuism to 
the development of English prose must have been, though less in extent, 
similar to the gain of English poetry from the study of the sonnet from 
Wyatt to Shakespeare. 

Required Reading. Euphues, selections at random. 

2. Robert Greene ( 1^60-1 jg2) 

Authorities. Life and complete works of Greene by 
Grosart (London, 1881), 15 vols.; Jusserand, The 
English Novel, Ch. iv. ; Arber's edition of Menaphon 
with Nash's Preface; Bell, Poems of Robert Greene, 
Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson (Bohn). 

Despite the phenomenal success of Euphues, Lyly never 
attempted another novel. He was not working for mere 
gain nor for mere popularity ; his ambitions were centered 
upon the one thought of gaining favor at court. He 
would please the Queen with dramas sugared with fulsome 
flattery ; dramas in which her glorified self should appear 
in thin disguise. In the meantime, however, others 
were reaping the fruit of his discovery. Robert Greene, 
a leader of the roistering crew that '* invaded London 
from the universities during the close of Elizabeth's 
reign," was the first to realize the great possibilities in 
the field that Lyly was neglecting. To this erratic 
genius, whose life reads like a chapter from La Vie de 
Boheme, literature was valuable chiefly because it put 
" a spel in his purse to conjure up a good cuppe of wine 
with at all times." " He made no account of winning 
credit by his workes," says Nash. He worked rapidly 
and spasmodically. " In a night and a day would he 
have yarkt up a pamphlet " that would have cost another 
man seven years. The spell of Euphues could open all 

z8 



2 74 The Foundations of English Literature 

Lyly's Legatees Rise of the Sentimental Novel 

doors and lavish emoluments upon any who could wield 
it, and Greene soon caught the trick so cleverly that he 
even surpassed Lyly himself. Beginning with Mamilla 
in 1583, he published during the next seven years no less 
than fifteen " love-pamphlets," as he called his novels, 
all of them containing the great Euphuist's tricks of 
style : his languid elegance, his excessive prettiness, and 
his abnormal botany and zoology. Euphues was forgotten 
in the popularity of this new and voluminous romancer. 
The publishers, declared Nash, considered themselves 
"blest to pay Greene dear for the very dregs of his wit." 
Following Greene a veritable school of young novelists 
entered the lists, — Lodge, Riche, Warner, Dickenson, 
and others, — to contend for the spoils of Euphues, Never 
before was such a plethora of elegance and sentiment 
showered upon the reading public. ** In the countrey 
of Bohemia there rayned a king called Pandosto," begins 
the novel, and immediately we lose sight of time and 
place and wander in a society that never was and never 
can be, amid a landscape that defies human geography, 
and meet adventures such ** as youthful poets dream ** 
on midsummer nights. Everything is carried to ex- 
tremes. Doralicia was " so adorned with more than 
earthlie perfection as she seemed to be framed by nature 
to blemishe nature, and that beautie had skipt beyond 
her skil in framing a piece of such curious workmanship." 
There is no middle ground. 

The lovers [says Gosse] are devoted beyond belief, the knights are braver, 
the shepherds wiser, the nymphs more lovely and more flinty-hearted than 
tongue can tell ; the courteous amorous couples file down the long arcades 
of the enchanted forest, and find the madrigal that Rosander or the hapless 
Arsinous has fastened to the balsam tree, or else they gather round the 



The Transition to Finished Prose 275 

Decline of Euphuism Sidney's Arcadia 

alabaster tomb of one who died for love, and read the sonnet that his own 
hand has engraved there. 

With the pubHcation of Sidney's Arcadia in 1590 
Euphuism lost its vogue and a new phase of ItaHanate 
prose sprang into popularity. 

Suggested Reading. Selections from Menaphon, Ar- 
ber's ed. 

J. Sir Philip Sidney (155^-1586) 

In 1580, while under a cloud at court, Sidney had 
passed several months at the country residence of his 
sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and to while away the 
time he had amused himself and his gracious hostess 
with the construction of the Arcadia^ a prose romance. 
There is every evidence that Sidney regarded this work 
simply as a recreation. ** For sterner eyes it is not," he 
wrote to his sister, ** being but a trifle and that triflingly 
handled." It was never revised; it was never even 
finished; it was a mere rough draft of a romance, written 
to divert an idle hour and to be burned as soon as read. 
But fortunately it was not burned. Four years after 
Sidney's death it was brought forth and published under 
the title of the Countess of Pembroke s Arcadia, and its 
appearance created a sensation in the literary world well- 
nigh as great as that occasioned by the publication of 
Euphues ten years before. Its vogue was immediate. 
Greene wrote no more ** love pamphlets"; Euphuism 
went out of style never again to appear in English liter- 
ature, and Arcadianism at once became the fashionable 
form of prose. 

Under Sidney's definition the Arcadia is a pastoral 
poem. " Poesy," he says in his Defeizse^ ** is a speaking 



276 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Purpose of the Romance Its Prose Style 

picture, with this end, — to teach and delight*'; and 
again, " it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet. 
. . . But it is that feigning notable images of virtues, 
vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which 
must be the right describing note to know a poet by." 
Measured by this standard, the Arcadia belongs with 
The Faerie Queene. Its moral is hazy at times, but it 
is never lost. The purpose of the romance, according 
to Fulke Greville, Sidney's early friend, ** was to limn 
out such exact pictures of every posture of the mind 
that any man might see how to set a good counte- 
nance upon all the discountenances of adversity." Oth- 
erwise it is a love-story, laid in Arcadia, the paradise of 
shepherds, and full of diverting episodes and romantic 
adventures. 

The style of the romance deserves careful attention. 
Sidney denounced all of Lyly's tricks of style as barbar- 
ous and pedantic. Very seldom does he use the alliter- 
ated balance, and never does he encroach upon the realm 
of natural history. But his style is nevertheless highly 
embellished, and it could hardly have been otherwise. 
The Arcadia is the dream of a young Elizabethan courtier 
in temporary exile, full of the ideals of chivalry, of great 
exploits, of gorgeous drapery and furnishings, of tourna- 
ments and pageants and romantic adventures, and it is 
the work of one who believed that he was writing a poem. 
What wonder if it is ruffled like a courtier, if it is daintily 
perfumed and exquisitely jewelled ! But there is no such 
straining after effect, no such embellishment dragged in 
by main force as in Lyly and Greene. It is prose that 
flows like a poem, with liquid cadences and beautiful 
periods. It is a style which, though it is over-ornamented 



The Transition to Finished Prose 277 

Its Great Influence on Later Writers Thomas Nash 

at times, was, nevertheless, a long step in advance of 
Euphuism towards the perfect product of later days. 

As a novel, too, the Arcadia was a distinct advance 
upon anything that had been previously written. Even 
now it may be read with interest for the story alone, a 
statement that is certainly not true of Euphues and its 
followers. Its influence even down to Dryden's day was 
enormous. The great fame of its author and the real 
charm of the story combined to give it an influence which 
few other novels have ever been able to exert. 

Required Reading. The Arcadia, Book i. The most 
accessible edition is that published by Sampson, Low & 
Marston and imported by the Scribners. 

/J.. Thomas Nash (i^6y-i6oo) 

Authorities. The only complete collection of Nash's 
works is Grosart's edition (London, 1883-84), 6 vols. ; 
see also Jusserand, Ch. vi., and Morley, Vol. ix. 

The last step in the development of the Elizabethan 
novel was taken by Thomas Nash, another of that 
strangely^ gifted and boisterous group of young men who 
so completely took possession of the closing decade of 
the century. With Nash the realistic novel, the novel 
founded on actual life, first appears in English literature. 
Greene was in reality the pioneer; his ** Cony-catching 
pamphlets," issued during the last two years of his life, 
had described with minuteness the criminal class of Lon- 
don, but it was not until Nash had issued in 1594 his 
Unfortunate Traveller, or the Adventures of Jack Wilton, 
that a novel was attempted based wholly upon real life. 
The tale is " a picaresque romance — that is to say, a 
romance describing realistically the shifts and adventures, 



278 The Foundations of English Literature 

The First Realistic Novel The Forerunner of Defoe 

perils and escapes, of a light-hearted, witty, spring-heeled 
knave, who goes through all worldly vicissitudes, thus 
lending himself to his creator's purpose to describe or 
satirize all classes of society." The book is full of ad- 
ventures, of realistic pictures and character-sketches, 
strung upon a slight thread of plot. After a vivid de- 
scription of life in England during the days of Henry 
VIII., the author conducts his hero through France and 
Germany to Italy, in which ** drain and sink of hell " he 
finds ample opportunities for observation and adventure. 

For vividness of description and for skill at character- 
ization Nash may be compared even with Defoe. He 
was a fastidious chooser of words. Mere generalizations 
did not satisfy him : he must have the one strong specific 
word that would best reproduce the character or scene, 
and it is this constant struggle for originality and force 
that is his chief excellence as a writer. His metaphors 
are ** terse and telling," and altogether his style, though 
here and there it shows traces of Lyly and the artificial 
school, is graphic and picturesque. 

Nash had no immediate followers. He stood for more 
than a century a solitary figure; a pioneer who had 
strayed into a rich field where no one wished to follow, a 
field which he soon abandoned himself. But his influ- 
ence told at last. ** As Sir Philip Sidney was the precur- 
sor of Richardson," says Raleigh, ** so Nash is the direct 
forerunner of Defoe. . . . The Unfortunate Traveller 
stands alone among the productions of a many-sided, 
vigorous, and brilliant age, and among the novels of that 
age must certainly be counted the most vigorous and 
brilliant." 

The Elizabethan Novel, Thus was evolved the Eliza- 



The Transition to Finished Prose 279 

The Novel and English Prose Style Prose Flows in Two Currents 

bethan novel. It was the child of Italy ; it was from first 
to last clothed in peculiar and fantastic literary forms; 
yet it marks a definite stage in the evolution of English 
prose, and it is the foundation of the modern English 
novel. It is impossible to understand the age without a 
study of it. Grotesque as it often was in style and senti- 
ment, it nevertheless refined both the language and the 
manners of the people. From first to last it was used as 
a vehicle for moral instruction : Lyly's first aim was to 
give wise and philosophic advice; Sidney, like Spenser, 
would seek ** to fashion a gentleman or noble person in 
vertuous and gentle discipline," and even Nash, the jolly 
roisterer of the London inns, would show in vivid colors 
the evil side of life that the innocent might avoid it. The 
influence of the novel upon the language was certainly 
great. It was the school in which English prose received 
its earliest laws and its first shaping touch. For the first 
tim.e it was realized that prose was as susceptible of artis- 
tic finish as poetry. It was but a step from the elaborate 
and highly ornate prose of Sidney to the polished and 
stately periods of Hooker and the perfect creations of 
the great prose masters. 

The strong and homely old native prose all through 
the period kept on parallel with the new-fangled product. 
There seemed in the minds of writers to be a distinct line 
drawn between prose written to please and that written 
to instruct. From the same pen would come work that 
was stiff and florid, and work that was rude and simple, 
and to compare the two was like setting the ruffled and 
perfumed courtier beside the rude and simple peasant. 
It was an era of pamphlets. The Marprelate controversy 
was waged fiercely during a part of the time that the 



28o The Foundations of English Literature 

The Marprelate Controversy Spirited Prose Narratives 

novel was evolving, and many of the writers, even Lyly 
and Nash, were connected with it. But the war of pam- 
phlets added little to English literature. In those fierce 
tracts, hot with controversy, prose reverted largely to its 
native type — homely, unfinished, often obscure, yet at 
times exceedingly forcible and picturesque. 

A few spirited records of travel there were (Hakluyt's 
Voj/ag-es, for instance, and Raleigh's Last Fight of the Re- 
venge), a few notable translations, and several famous 
chronicles, but they throw no new light upon the de- 
velopment of the age, and they add little that is new 
toward an appreciation of the tendencies of English 
prose. 

References. For a full consideration of the Marprelate 
controversy the student should consult Arber, The Martin 
Marprelate Controversy ; the prose of the pamphlets is 
carefully considered in Saintsbury, Elizabethan Litera- 
ture. Raleigh's The Last Fight of the Revenge is among 
Arber's Reprints. Holinshed's Chronicles and North's 
Plutarch are so closely connected with Shakespeare's work 
that they can be easily studied, large parts of them be- 
ing reproduced in Morley's edition of Shakespeare and 
Furness' Variorum. They may also be found in Hazlet, 
Shakespeare' s Library, 



CHAPTER XX 

THE TRANSITION TO SHAKESPEARE 

Authorities, The same as on page 200 above ; Gosson, 
School of Abuse, Ed. Arber; The Works of George Pee le, 
Ed. Bullen, 2 vols. ; also Ed. Dyce ; Marlowe, Doctor 
Faust us ; Greene, History of Friar Bacon and Friar 
Bungay, Ed. Ward (Clarendon Press) ; Dramatic Works 
of Robert Greene, Ed. Dyce; Manly, Specimens of the 
Pre -Shakespearian Drama, Vol. ii. (Athenaeum Press). 

In 1579, ^t ^^ opening of the creative era, English 
literature was flowing in two distinct channels. The 
Italian influence in its various phases had resulted in an 
artificial product that seems at first sight to dominate the 
whole period. The poems of Spenser, who was both 
** the morning and the evening " of the movement, the 
creations of Sidney and the lyrists, and the works of 
Lyly and the novelists are the most conspicuous produc- 
tions of the pre-Shakespearian period, yet all of these 
authors wrote for an extremely limited audience. They 
touched only the fashionable and the cultured ; the people 
knew nothing of their artistic creations. All out of sight 
there still flowed on the old popular literature, — the bal- 
lads and rude songs, the vigorous, homely prose of 
preacher and chronicler, and, above all, the crude but 
strong old native drama. 

From the very first the stage had found a congenial 
home in England. The common people had greeted 
with enthusiasm every phase of the drama from its first 
religious beginnings down to its final secular form. All 

281 



282 The Foundations of English Literature 

Fondness of the People for the Native Drama The Popular Drama in 1579 

through the Tudor century it had constantly grown in 
popularity until at length it became the chief diversion of 
all classes. The dramatic representation took the place 
of the old minstrelsy. The solitary singer, wandering 
from court to court or from hamlet to hamlet, was now 
represented by the strolling band of actors. Instead of 
the single reciter who, with voice and instrument, repro- 
duced the stirring scene, there was now the group of 
reciters working in concert. Nor did their themes differ 
greatly from those of the old minstrels. There must be 
a moving story which the hearer must feel. If it be a 
tragedy, there must be a surfeit of slaughter; blood must 
flow as freely as in Beowulf. In some of the early 
tragedies the entire dramatis personcB perish. ** Give 
me the man who will all others kill and last of all him- 
self ! " cries one of Fletcher's characters. When there is 
comedy it must be broad and coarse: quarrels of fish- 
wives ; oaths and billingsgate ; hard blows and torn hair. 
There is no attempt at dramatic art : the unities are 
undreamed of; kings and peasants jostle each other; 
comedy and tragedy are hopelessly mixed. There is no 
unity of plot, no unity of characterization. The play is 
a mere series of detached scenes in which the action is 
violent, and the spectator goes away surfeited with sen- 
sation. Such was the popular drama in 1579, ten years 
before the first work of Shakespeare. 

The attempt to naturalize the classic drama founded 
upon Latin models and upon Aristotle we have already 
noted. The cultured class welcomed the innovation. 
Sidney as late as 1583 condemned the popular dramas 
as "gross absurdities"; ** all their plays be neither 
tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings with rigth 



The Transition to Shakespeare 283 

Failure of the Classic Forms The Rise of the Theaters 

clowns " ; " faulty both in place and time, the two nec- 
essary companions of all corporal actions." Scholars did 
their best to introduce the new form and to discourage 
the production of inartistic work. Between 1568 and 
1580 fifty-two dramas were performed at court and, judg- 
ing by their titles, which are all that remain of them, 
they were prevailingly of the classic type. But despite 
the efforts of the classicists the native romantic drama 
increased constantly in popularity. 

The Rise of the Theaters. In 1576 the Corporation of 
London, believing that the popular stage was an enemy 
to morality, and also that the coming and going of wan- 
dering bands of players increased the danger of contagion 
in time of plague, ordered that no theatrical performances 
should be given within the city limits. The action marks 
an era in the history of the English drama; it turned the 
eyes of all London toward the popular stage, and it pre- 
cipitated a movement that was of the highest importance. 
A spirited contest arose in which all the city was involved. 
Lodge wrote a Defense of Stage Plays ; Gosson put forth 
his School of Abuse ^ " conteining a pleasaunt invective 
against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such like 
Caterpillers of a commonwealth " ; and Sidney replied in 
his noble Defense of Poesy , in the course of which he de- 
fended the drama in its classic form. The players, profit- 
ing by the publicity thus thrust upon them, boldly 
continued their performances, avoiding the law by setting 
up regular playhouses just outside the city bounds. Thus 
began the permanent theater; thus ended the period of 
strolling players, of performances in the courtyards of 
inns, of private companies in the employ of noblemen. In 
1576 and in the years immediately following no less than 



284 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Courtly Drama Yields to the Popular Shakespeare's Predecessors 

five prominent playhouses were erected just outside the 
city bounds, and their success was phenomenal. The 
drama soon became the leading diversion of London. 

It is obvious that the popular and the classic dramas 
could not forever move side by side. A clash was 
inevitable. Which would yield, the cultured minority 
or the people ? In Germany and France the cultured 
classes won, their drama became purely classic; but in 
England the people held stubbornly to the form that 
through centuries of evolution had become peculiarly 
their own. It was the courtly drama that yielded at 
last ; it was the lawless romantic form that finally became 
the national type. 

Shakespeare s Predecessors. But the old native drama 
could not survive unchanged. It must gain organic 
unity; it must cast off its crudities, and, without losing 
any of its abundant vitality and individuality, it must ac- 
quire artistic finish and refinement. In 1579 this seemed 
like an impossibility, like a work that would require long 
and gradual evolution. But it came all in a moment. 
During the next decade there arose a school of drama- 
tists who harmonized the discordant elements. Start- 
ing from the popular standpoint and adding nothing 
which at any time could offend their audiences, upon 
whose good will they depended for support, they grad- 
ually refined out the worst elements, adding all that 
was best in the classic forms, until at length everything 
was ready for a supreme master who should make a 
model for the English drama of all time. 

Perhaps the most picturesque event in the history of 
Enghsh literature is the descent upon London of this 
boisterous crew of young men from the universities of 



The Transition to Shakespeare 285 

The University Wits Their Genius and Activity 

Cambridge and Oxford. For over a decade, beginning 
soon after 1580, they were the most conspicuous element 
in the Hterary life of the city. Greene, Peele, Lyly, 
Kyd, Nash, Lodge, Whetstone, Marlowe — it was a wild 
and wayward group of youths, who exhausted every form 
of vice and fast living, and who, the most of them, drove 
themselves into early graves. Marlowe was dead at the 
age of twenty-nine, Greene at thirty-two, Nash at thirty- 
three, and Peele at forty. They were peculiarly the 
products of Elizabeth's reign : they were born after her 
accession to the throne; they died, almost all of them, 
before the end of her career; they received their training 
during her most glorious period ; they were full of the 
new and exultant spirit of the age, — so full that they 
were unbalanced and overcome. Their genius and ver- 
satility and activity were marvelous. They attempted 
everything, they entered every realm of literary art, 
but it was the drama that most attracted them. They 
had no intention of becoming reformers. They wished 
simply to cater to the popular taste that they might keep 
their purses full ; but they had received the best educa- 
tion to be had in their day; they were refined and cul- 
tured in their tastes and unconsciously their training told 
upon their work. They pruned the rudeness from the 
native drama, they refined it to an appreciable degree, 
but, aside from Marlowe, they did not change its form or 
its drift. ** Their chief importance," says Symonds, 
" consists in their having contributed to the formation of 
Marlowe's dramatic style. It Vv^as he who irrevocably 
decided the destinies of the romantic drama; and the 
whole subsequent evolution of that species, including 
Shakespeare's work, can be regarded as the expansion, 



286 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Great Work of Marlowe He Makes the Romantic Drama Possible 

rectification, and artistic ennoblement of the type fixed 
by Marlowe's epoch-making tragedies." In the light of 
this fact we need not examine in detail the work of 
Greene and Peele. Before 1587, when Marlowe put 
forth his earliest drama, they had done little save to 
prune away the roughest of the excrescences on the old 
native branch, and after this date they were content to 
follow their master. The whole English drama before 
Tamburlaine and the part that Marlowe played in reshap- 
ing it is best described in the prologue to his first play : 

From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, 
We '11 lead you to the stately tent of war, 
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine 
Threatening the world with high astounding terms, 
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. 

It was Marlowe's task to cast off the ** jigging," rhym- 
ing measures of rude playwrights and the trivial themes 
with which they pleased their simple audiences, and to 
substitute for them a stately, unrhymed measure full of 
** high astounding terms," and a plot that should deal 
with the deeds of kings, — even of kings who threatened 
the whole world. To show what he meant by '* jigging 
veins," let us quote almost at random from the dramas 
that held the stage when he began his work. Let us 
choose from Preston's Cambises, a play licensed in 1569: 

With speed I am sent all things to prepare. 

My message to doe as the king did declare. 

His Grace doth meane a banquet to make. 

Meaning in this place repast for to take. 

Wei, the cloth shal be laid, and all things in redines, 

To court to return, when doon is my busines ; 



The Transition to Shakespeare 287 



He Frees the Drama from Jigging Measures John Lyly 

or from Appius and Virginia, first printed in 1575 : 

Well, then, this is my counsel, thus standeth the case, 
Perhaps such a fetch as may please your Grace : 
There is no more ways, but hap or hap not, 
Either hap, or else hapless, to knit up the knot. 

One has only to read these short extracts in connection 
with the six Hnes quoted from the prologue to Tambur- 
laine to realize what Marlowe did for the English drama. 
Of the pre-Shakespearian group we will consider only 
Lyly and Marlowe. 

I. John Lyly (i^^j-1606) 

Authorities. The best edition of Lyly's dramas for 
general use is that in the Library of Old Authors, 2 vols. 
Lyly s Dramatic Works, Ed. Fairholt (London, 1858); 
Lyly's Endymion, Ed. Baker; " The Children's Com- 
panies," Shakesperiana, ix., No. 3; Morley, vol. ix. 
For full bibliography of Lyly, see Baker, Endyinio7t. 

The great success of Euphues placed Lyly at once at 
the head of the literary circle of the court and gave him 
the opportunity of supplying the Master of the Revels 
with plays for the royal amusement. The form that he 
chose for his new work was a variation of the old masque 
or pageant that had long been popular at the court revels. 
The scene is usually classic, — the vague, romantic Athens 
of the Midsummer Nighf s Dream ; the atmosphere is the 
golden one of fairy-land ; the texture of the plot is of the 
flimsiest : a bit of Grecian mythology or tradition, a few 
characters from legend or history, — Endymion, Sappho, 
Campaspe, — and an old story, vague and fanciful, often 
thinly clad in allegory. The play lends itself to gorgeous 
settings; what contrasts in Alexander, Diogenes, Cam- 



288 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Classicism He Alternates the Fanciful and the Comic 

paspe, Apelles! What magnificence in Midas and in 
Cynthia, who is at once the moon and the matchless 
Elizabeth! What statuesque beauty in Galatea, and 
Campaspe, and Daphne! 

Lyly's earliest play. The Woman in the Moon, was 
written in the verse forms of the classic school, but it is 
plainly evident that its author was not at ease. The 
penner of Euphues to be at his best must work in prose. 
The grace and brilliance of his style were obscured by the 
classic measures, and therefore, unconscious that he was 
revolutionizing one branch of the English drama, Lyly 
wrote all his other plays in the Euphuized prose of which 
he was so perfect a master. 

In all his dramas there are two distinct currents 
which seldom cross, — the one broadly comic, the other 
poetic and fanciful. In Endymion the fun is furnished 
by the scapegrace pages and by. the boastful and cowardly 
Sir Thopas ; in Campaspe it is furnished by the servants 
and by the philosopher Diogenes. There is some at- 
tempt at characterization, especially in the comic parts, 
but the more serious characters are often wooden to a 
degree. Campaspe at times breaks from her statue-like 
beauty into sweet womanhood, and Endymion once or 
twice, as in the scene where he awakes like Rip Van 
Winkle from his forty years' sleep, seems to be really 
alive, but such characters as Tellus and Cynthia are 
mere shadows. The style is finished and often beautiful ; 
only in the long soliloquies does the author carry his 
Euphuism to extremes, but even in these one constantly 
finds lines and passages of exquisite beauty. ** Love," 
says Alexander, ** falleth like a dew as well upon the low 
grasse as upon the high cedar." ** When will you finish 



The Transition to Shakespeare 289 

The First to Insert Lyrics in the Drama Lyly Invents Dramatic Prose 

Campaspe ? " he asks of the painter Apelles. " Never 
finish ! " replies the artist ; ** for always in absolute beauty 
there is somewhat above art." 

It was Lyly who first set the fashion of inserting lyrics 
into the drama. His comedies were all of them per- 
formed by the boy actors of the Royal Chapel and of St. 
Paul's, and the temptation to use the trained voice of 
the chorister was irresistible. Little songs are scattered 
everywhere, like Apelles' song in Campaspe, Sappho's 
song in Sappho and PhaoUy the song of Daphne in Midas, 
and that most spontaneous of all his lyrics, — the one that 
must have been singing in Shakespeare's ears when he 
wrote " Hark, hark, the lark," — the spring song in 
Campaspe : 

Who is 't now we hear ? 
None but the lark so shrill and clear. 
How at heauens gats she claps her wings, 
The morne not waking till shee sings ! 
Heark, heark, with what a pretty throat 
Poore Robin red-breast tunes his note ! 
Hearh how the jolly cuckoes sing 
"Cuckoe," to welcome in the spring, — 
** Cuckoe," to welcome in the spring ! 

Lyly's place in the history of Elizabethan literature is 
certainly a large one. His part in shaping English prose 
and the English novel has been commented upon, and in 
the history of the drama he is fully as prominent. It 
was he who first made use of dramatic prose and turned 
it to the use of comedy. So weighty was his example 
that by the close of the century prose was generally used 
by all dramatists for comic scenes. Marlowe used it in 
the minor scenes of Dr. Faustus ; and it became the uni- 
form practice of Shakespeare to cast in prose all passages 



290 The Foundations of English Literature 

He Elevates Comedy The Influence of Lyly 

of a comic nature, — all scenes where clowns and peasants 
take up the dialogue. It is not too much to say that 
Lyly gave to comedy its permanent form as Marlowe did 
to tragedy. 

Lyly deserves mention, too, for lifting comedy to a 
higher level. He showed that laughable situations may 
be produced without horse-play or coarseness. Often in 
his scenes we find real wit and humor: Alexander seizes 
the brush of Apelles and attempts a picture. ** How do 
I paint ? " he asks at length. " Like a king," answers 
the artist. Often there is amusing characterization, and 
everywhere there is a chasteness, a refinement of humor, 
which the later drama would have done well to copy. 

The comedies of Lyly were the direct precursors of 
such works as Shakespeare's Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
and the masques of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, 
and Milton. Surely Lyly deserves a most careful study 
by all who would seek the origin of the English drama. 

Required Reading. Campaspe, in Manly, Specimens 
of the Pre-Shakespearian Drama^ Vol. ii. ; or Endymion, 
Baker's Ed. 

2. Christopher Marlowe (1^64.-1^^^) 

Marlowe was one of the greatest poets of the world, whose work was 
cast by accident and caprice into an imperfect mold of drama. — Saints- 
bury. 

Authorities. The best edition of Marlowe's works is 
Bullen's, 3 vols. (Elizabethan Dramatists); the most 
convenient edition of his plays for the general student is 
Ellis' in the Mermaid Series. See also Marlowe's 
Dramatic Works, including translations (Scribners), and 
Bell, Poems of Robert GreenCy Christopher Marlowe^ and 



The Transition to Shakespeare 291 

The Sudden Advent of Marlowe Little Known of His Life 

Ben Jonson; (Bohn). McLaughlin, Edward the Second 
(Holt) ; Tancock, Edward the Second (Clarendon Press) ; 
Wagner, Dr. Faustus (London Series); Ward, Dr. 
Faustiis, with Green, Friar Bacon, etc. (Clarendon Press); 
and Thayer, Best Elizabethan Plays, which contains the 
Jew of Malta, are all valuable works. The most helpful 
studies of Marlowe are Lowell's in The Old British 
Dramatists, and Dowden's in Transcripts and Studies. 

As we read the long annals of the early English drama, 
noting its slow evolution, dwelling upon each minute 
change in form or spirit which may indicate the rate of 
growth and the tendency of development, suddenly, un- 
heralded and unaccounted for, there appears a youth 
of twenty-three who all in a moment with a single 
play advances the drama a whole era, making of it a new 
creation. His advent seems almost like an apparition. 
No one knows when he came to London, or whence he 
came, or, with few exceptions, what had been his pre- 
vious career. 

.In the parish of Canterbury it is recorded that on Feb- 
ruary 26, 1564, ** was christened Christopher Marlowe, 
the Sonne of John Marlowe " — a date exactly two months 
before the christening of Shakespeare at Stratford-on- 
Avon. The father was a shoemaker, a man of some 
ability, for he was ** Clarke of St. Maries," but of moder- 
ate means; yet in 1581 we find his son matriculated at 
Oxford where in 1583 he received the bachelor's degree. 
No more is known of the young student until he sud- 
denly startled London with the " high astounding lines " 
of Tamburlaine. He was unknown in literary circles. 
The wild young crew whose revels he was so soon to join 
denounced him as an intruder. Nash and Greene, fear- 
ing for their own laurels in the sudden popularity of the 



292 The Foundations of English Literature 

He Recreates Blank Verse Blank Verse Before Marlowe 

new favorite, broke into coarse abuse of his *' swelling 
bombast of bragging blank verse," but they were soon 
his friends, using his *' mighty line" as if it were their 
own creation. 

The new thing that Marlowe brought to the English 
drama was artistic blank verse. Not that he invented 
the measure; Surrey had first introduced it to English 
readers in his translations from Virgil, and it had been 
used for dramatic work by the authors of Gorboduc and 
the classic dramas, but it was a wooden and lifeless thing 
before Marlowe touched it. The blank verse of Gorboduc 
halts at the end of every line ; the voice struggles desper- 
ately over the syllables, to come down heavily on the last 
word of the verse, where it lingers for a moment before 
again launching out. The anatomy of the measure is 
unconcealed ; it is as evident and well-nigh as painful as 
that of a corduroy road : 

Lo, here the end of these two youthful kings, 
The father's death, the ruin of their realms ! 
O most unhappy state of counsellors, 
That light on so unhappy lords and times, 
That neither can their good advice be heard, 
Yet must they bear the blames of ill success. 
But I will to the king, their father, haste. 
Ere this mischief come to the likely end. 

This was the best effort of English dramatic blank verse 
before 1587, when Marlowe began to write; this was the 
measure that only nine years after this date Shakespeare 
was to mold into the perfect cadences of The Merchant 
of Venice. To show what Marlowe did we have only to 
compare these halting, lifeless lines with a typical passage 
from Doctor Faustus : 



The Transition to Shakespeare 293 



His Liquid Cadences His " Mighty Line " 

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ? 
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. 

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in those lips 
And all is dross that is not Helena. 

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air 
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ; 
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter 
When he appeared to hapless Semele. 

But what most of all impressed the contemporaries of 
Marlowe was his ** high astounding terms." In the 
opinion of Mr. Ward, the dramatist intentionally 
** strained the force of diction to the utmost " as a com- 
pensation for the rhymes and jingles of the contemporary 
drama. Tamburlaine is full of '' mighty lines," — round, 
resonant proper names, and reverberating phrases. 

And Christian merchants that with Russian stems 
Plough up huge furrows in the Caspian sea. 

Is it not passing brave to be a king 
And ride in triumph through Persepolis ? 

Of such a burden as outweighs the sands 
And all the craggy rocks of Caspia. 

Awake, ye men of Memphis ! — hear the clang 
Of Scythian trumpets ! — hear the basilisks 
That, roaring, shake Damascus' turrets down ! 
The rogue of Volga holds Zenocrate. 

The partition between such lines and mere bombast is 
indeed a thin one. Marlowe often overstepped the limit ; 
he is full of ranting, turgid passages which in the mouth 
of a strong-lunged actor would send a thrill through the 
simple audiences that first heard them. Some of the 



294 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Frequent Bombast Elements in Common with the Popular Drama 

soliloquies of the Scythian monarch are pure fustian. It 
was against this inartistic work which often blemishes 
Marlowe's plays that Shakespeare speaks in Hamlet : 

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwigpated fellow tear 
a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who 
for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and 
noise. 

Marlowe's three earliest dramas, Tamburlaine^ Doctor 
FaustuSy and The Jew of Malta have much in common. 
They belong in plot and spirit to the sensational, popu- 
lar drama which then held the stage. Tamburlaine is 
full of the old spirit, — few plays in all literature so reek 
with blood ; Doctor Faustus is a kind of Morality play, — 
good and evil angels struggle for the soul of Faustus, the 
Devil in various forms assists him to play all manner of 
impish tricks, and finally he carries the doomed man on 
his back to the flames in the old Morality fashion ; the 
Jew of Malta becomes after the second act of the play 
a mere ogre whose deeds of crime are bounded only by 
his creator's imagination. 

Nor are these the only resemblances to the primitive 
English drama. To Marlowe the theater was primarily 
a source of income ; he must please the people if he was 
to receive his pay, and he dare not depart too radically 
from the old methods. His plays are therefore destitute 
of that fine humor that preserves the work of Shake- 
speare. The audience laughs often at Doctor Faustus, 
but it is for the same reason that they laugh at Vice in 
the Moralities. ** There are," says Lowell, " properly 
speaking, no characters in the plays of Marlowe, — but 
personages and interlocutors. We do not get to know 



The Transition to Shakespeare 295 

His Inability to Portray Character Edward II. His Strongest Creation 

them, but only to know what they do or say. The 
nearest approach to a character is Barabbas, in The Jew 
of Malta, and he is but the incarnation of the popular 
hatred of the Jew. There is really nothing human in 
him. He seems a bugaboo rather than a man." The 
action of the plays is without an organic center. The 
acts and scenes of Doctor Faustus, for instance, are de- 
tached stories; they are the several adventures and 
escapades of a man who has the Devil as his servant. 
** Nothing happens," continues Lowell, ** because it 
must, but because the author wills it so. The concep- 
tion of life is purely arbitrary and as far from nature as 
that of an imaginative child." 

In Edward the Second there is more careful work. The 
plot moves toward a culmination and the scenes are but 
the accessories. The bombast of Tamburlaine and the 
earlier plays is almost wholly wanting, perhaps because 
the theme was narrower and did not kindle the author's 
imagination. His conception of the weak and vacillating 
king, of his mental anguish and fearful death, is full of 
power and truth. ** The reluctant pangs of abdicating 
royalty in Edward," says Charles Lamb, " furnished 
hints which Shakespeare scarce improved in Richard II.'' 

But Marlowe, despite the restraint and the artistic 
superiority of Edward the Second, displayed, after all, 
his greatest power in his first tragedies. It is in them 
that we find his real contributions to the drama. It 
must constantly be borne in mind that Tamburlaine, and 
indeed all of Marlowe's plays, was the work of a mere 
youth, — of a sensitive and imaginative soul in its most 
extravagant period. Hero and Leander in its passion and 
imaginative richness can be compared only with the work 



296 The Foundations of English Literature 

Marlowe's Gorgeous Pictures His Unlimited Creative Power 

of Keats. The young dramatist dreamed of Oriental 
magnificence : 

A thousand galleys, manned with Christian slaves 

I freely give thee, which shall cut the straits 

And bring armados from the coasts of Spain 

Fraughted with gold of rich America. 

The Grecian virgins shall attend on thee, 

Skilful in music and in amorous lays. 

With naked negroes shall thy coach be drawn, 

And as thou rid'st in triumph through the streets 

The pavement underneath thy chariot wheels 

With Turkey carpets shall be covered 

And cloth of Arras hung about the walls. 

A hundred bassoes, clothed in crimson silk. 

Shall ride before thee on Barbarian steeds ; 

And when thou goest, a golden canopy 

Enchased with precious stones, which shine as bright 

As that fair veil that covers all the world. 

And more than this — for all I cannot tell. 

There is no limit to the gorgeous dream save the bounds 
of the dreamer's imagination. His fancy ran riot : he must 
deal only with kings who have absolute power and world 
dominion; with men who at the price of their souls have 
all pleasure and all power at command ; of monsters who 
exhaust all the energies of crime in every form. But this 
very passion and extravagance of youth, which a few 
years would have subdued and tempered, only proves the 
enormous power of the man. The sonorous passages of 
Tamburlaine, the bombast, the passion, the magnificent 
settings, the imaginative power that could scarce be satis- 
fied with the most gorgeous pages of human experience, 
were not lost upon the later drama. 

It was he afld no other [says Ward] who first inspired with true poetic 
passion the form of literature to which his chief efforts were consecrated. 



The Transition to Shakespeare 297 

His Influence on the Later Drama His Early Death 

After Marlowe had written it was impossible for our dramatists to return to 
the cold horrors or tame declamation of the earlier tragic drama : The 
Spanish Tragedy a.ndi Gordoduchsid alike been left behind. " His raptures 
were all air and fire," and it is his gift of passion which, together with his 
services to the outward form of the English drama, makes Marlowe worthy 
to be called not a predecessor but the earliest in the immortal company of 
our great dramatists. 

The early death of Marlowe — he was stabbed in a 
tavern brawl before he was thirty — can never be too 
much regretted. He is the only man in the whole range 
of English history of whom we can say," Had he lived he 
might perhaps have equaled Shakespeare." He was, 
like his own Faustus, a victim to the baser part of his 
nature, and the final words of the chorus in his play were 
his own epitaph : 

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight 

And burned is Apollo's laurel bough. 

That sometime grew within this learned man. 

Faustus is gone ; regard his hellish fall 

Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise 

Only to wonder at unlawful things 

Whose deepness does intice such forward wits. 

To practice more than heavenly power permits. 

Required Reading. The student should read at least 
two of Marlowe's plays, Doctor Faustus^ or The Jew of 
Malta, and Edward the Second. 



CHAPTER XXI 

SHAKESPEARE 

Authorities. The best life of Shakespeare is that by 
Sidney Lee ; the most helpful introduction to Shake- 
speare is Dowden's Primer; the standard single-volume 
edition of Shakespeare's works is the Globe. A veritable 
library of commentary and criticism has grown up about 
the great poet, all of which is of more or less value ; the 
following books comprise the minimum list that the gen- 
eral student should have at hand : a standard edition of 
Shakespeare's complete works, — Hudson, White, Rolfe, 
Morley, Clark and Wright, the Arden, or any other 
carefully edited, well printed edition ; Furness, Vario- 
rum ; Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare ; 
Dowden, Shakspere ; his Mind and Art; Moulton, 
Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist ; Wendell, William 
Shakespeare ; Wyndham, Poems of Shakespeare ; Ger- 
vinus, Shakespeare Commentaries; Ten Brink, Five 
Lectures on Shakespeare ; Bartlett, Concordance to Shake- 
speare ; Welsh, English Masterpiece Course ^ for practical 
bibliography. 

At last all was ready for the supreme master who 
should end the long era of preparation and of gradual 
development and fix the final form of the English lan- 
guage and the English drama. It was the earliest mo- 
ment when such a master could appear. The language 
before the days of Wyatt had been a barbarous mixture, 
but the refining influence of the Courtly Writers and the 
civilizing force of contact with continental culture had 
humanized and enriched it until now it was an instru- 
ment of marvelous compass and flexibility. The English 

298 



Shakespeare 299 



The Need of a Great Literary Master He Must Come from the People 

people, too, for the first time were ready for the great 
national poet. The nation in its modern sense had just 
come into being; it had just awakened to a realization 
of its position ; it had for the first time developed a sense 
of national consciousness. The spirit of the era was 
dramatic ; the age was preeminently one of action, and 
he who would interpret it must do it with the drama as 
his medium. The stage had been prepared ; it had been 
gradually evolved from the nation's life; the people of 
all classes were ready ; there was lacking only the master, 
and just at the right moment he appeared. 

That this supreme English master should have sprung 
from the common people, that he should have been a 
man untouched by the schools, one whose entire youth 
had been passed amid the ordinary life of a remote 
country village, while it presents one of the most dif^- 
cult problems in the whole history of English literature, 
is, nevertheless, a fact of immense significance. It was 
a man from the people who gave the final form to the 
English drama, and who fixed forever the English 
tongue, a fact that wonderfully illustrates the strength 
and the resistance of the old native English stock. 
Shakespeare settled forever all question as to which was 
to rule English literature, the classic and courtly elements 
or the strong old Anglo-Saxon undercurrent which ever 
since the Conquest had been constantly appearing, — in 
Layamon, in Langland, in the balladists, in Latimer. 
The one thing that impresses us most as we study the 
great dramatist is his enormous personality. He is him- 
self; he can be compared with no one; he can be traced 
to no one. He is not content, like the classicists, to fol- 
low older models ; he borrows freely, but all that he bor- 



300 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Briticism of Shakespeare John Shakespeare and Mary Arden 

rows he turns into the mold of his own mind and it 
comes forth utterly new, utterly unlike any previous 
effort. But this individuality is only another name for 
his Briticism. He is English in every fiber of his being; 
he is the incarnation of the English nation; and all of 
this Briticism was but his inheritance from the common 
people from whom he sprung, the common people who 
since the days of the Conquest had preserved unemascu- 
lated the old native English spirit. 

The Life of Shakespeare^ like that of all early English 
writers who were unconnected with the civil government, 
has come down to us in a very fragmentary condition. 
About his origin there is no question. The life of John 
Shakespeare, his father, as revealed by the local records, 
stands out with considerable completeness. We know 
that he was a shrewd, energetic business man, the de- 
scendant of a long line of substantial Warwickshire yeo- 
men. In 1 55 1 he had removed to Stratford-on-Avon, 
where he began his career as a dealer in agricultural prod- 
uce, and so marked was his early prosperity that he was 
soon able not only to make considerable purchases of real 
estate in Stratford and to become a prominent figure in 
the little village, but to win for his wife a daughter of 
one of the best-known families of Warwickshire. The 
marriage of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden took 
place in the autumn of 1557; seven years later, on April 
26th, according to the parish register, was baptized 
William, their first son and third child. A tradition, 
seemingly well grounded, that the poet died on the anni- 
versary of his birth, has led to the general acceptance of 
April 23d as his birthday. 

Nothing more is heard of Shakespeare until 1582, the 



Shakespeare 301 

The Life of John Shakespeare Shakespeare's Early Years 

year of his marriage, but his father's doings are recorded 
with considerable fullness. He continued to grow in im- 
portance in municipal affairs until, in 1 571, he became 
chief alderman of the city. After the next year, how- 
ever, he began to lose interest in public life. His family 
had become large and expensive ; he was for some reason 
in constant need of large sums of money ; he began to 
mortgage his property, and for the next ten or fifteen 
years his life was a constant struggle with financial diffi- 
culties. His loss of fortune, however, did not deprive 
his sons of educational privileges. The grammar school 
of the town provided free tuition, and the young poet 
doubtless became one of its pupils; but his education 
could not have been a broad one, even had he received all 
that the school had to give. ** The instruction," says 
Lee, ** was mainly confined to the Latin language and 
literature," but what the average student actually ac- 
quired of this subject was probably not large. 

Shakespeare doubtless left the school early. According 
to Rowe, his first biographer, he was taken away at the 
age of fourteen, doubtless to assist his father in his busi- 
ness. We know that at eighteen he was married to Anne 
Hathaway, a maiden of the neighborhood, who was eight 
years his senior, and that in 1585, at the age of twenty- 
one, he was the father of three children. Then we hear 
no more of him until suddenly he appears in London as 
a successful actor and playwright. The whole period 
from the date of his marriage until 1592 is almost un- 
known, but in the absence of authentic record, tradition 
and conjecture have been exceedingly busy. According 
to Rowe, he. left Stratford to avoid prosecution for deer- 
stealing, a story that is not improbable; according to 



302 The Foundations of English Literature 

He Appears in London The Elizabethan Theater 

others, he left for London with a stroUing band of play- 
ers that had visited his native town; and according to 
still others, he set out on foot for the great metropolis to 
seek his fortune and found his first employment in hold- 
ing horses before the theaters. Such stories must be 
read with caution. It is certain, however, that Shake- 
speare must have been in London as early as 1586, or the 
year following, and that he must have found early em- 
ployment in one of the theaters. At first this must have 
been of the simplest and most menial nature, but gradu- 
ally as he gained experience and confidence he doubtless 
was entrusted with minor parts in the plays presented, 
and with the recasting and adapting of old dramas for the 
use of the company. His rapid rise was but the natural 
consequence of his sound common sense and business 
abilities, inherited from his father, and his undoubted 
quickness and sympathy and mental power. His country 
honesty and hard-headed sense kept him in a large de- 
gree out of the Bohemian life that was ruining so many 
of his fellow-workers; his earnestness and eagerness to 
succeed kept him from dissipating his powers. 

The Elizabethan Theater. The condition of the Eng- 
lish drama when Shakespeare first appeared in London 
has already been described. The theaters just outside 
the city bounds had begun their period of immense 
popularity. People of all classes filled them nightly 
and applauded the coarse comedy and fierce tragedy that 
were typical of the period. The accessories of the theater 
were of the rudest kind. The stage was a mere raised 
platform without scenery or illusion. 

You shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other [declared Sir 
Philip Sidney], and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when 



Shakespeare 303 



Its Primitive Nature The London of Shakespeare's Youth 

he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will 
not be conceived. Now ye shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, 
and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear 
news of shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept 
it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster with 
fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a 
cave. While in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four 
swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a 
pitched field ? — Defense of Poesy. 

This accounts for the remarkable shifting of scene in the 
Elizabethan drama, a shifting that is often the despair 
of the modern stage manager. The scene changes con- 
stantly, as Hallam observed, for the simple reason that it 
does not change at all. The female roles all through the 
era were played by boys. The theater was circular, with 
balconies one above the other for the better class of the 
audience, while the central space, " the pit," was occu- 
pied by the poorer classes, " the groundlings," who stood 
during the entire performance. 

It is not hard to imagine the experiences of the sensi- 
tive, poetic country lad, who doubtless never before had 
left his native region, as he lived those early days in the 
mighty London whose very air was electric with the 
thrill of a new life. Everything must have appealed 
strongly to his imagination ; everything must have made 
a profound impression. He appeared when the stage was 
passing through its most critical period. The drama, in 
the hands of Marlowe and the University Wits, was 
changing its form, and there must have been excited dis- 
cussions behind the scenes of the playhouse. The sus- 
ceptible young poet was eager to learn, eager to succeed, 
and in such an environment he matured rapidly. 

The Period of Apprenticeship, 1^86-1 ^g/j.. In the ab- 



304 The Foundations of English Literature 



The Demand for Skillful Playwrights Shakespeare Retouches Old Plays 

sence of stage effects the attention of the EHzabethan 
audience was drawn with peculiar force to the actual 
words of the drama. Where the modern manager seeks 
constantly for new settings and new costumes to make 
old plays attractive, the Elizabethan manager sought 
constantly to add new and striking passages, to make 
new arrangements of scenes, and to change generally the 
effect of the play. Skillful playwrights were, therefore, 
constantly in the employ of the theaters, and often they 
earned a double salary by acting as well as writing. There 
is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare was constantly 
upon the stage as an actor, that this at length became his 
real profession, and it is more than probable that he 
turned to the editing and writing of plays as a mere mat- 
ter of business to add to the resources of his company and 
to eke out his regular salary. 

The first work of Shakespeare of which we have any 

record is Titus AndronicuSy an inferior tragedy, which 

Titus Andronicus, the young playwright retouched and 

1588-1590.* remodeled for immediate stage use. 

1 Henry VI., 1590-- ,,. < . 1 -ni 1 t 

1591. Nothmg can better illustrate the condi- 

Love'sLabour'sLost, ^^^^ q£ ^j^g English drama when Shake- 

1590. 
Comedy of Errors, spcarc began his work than this crude 

I 'and 2 Henr VI P^oduction. It is a history play written 
1591-1592. ' almost wholly from the popular stand- 

Two Gentlemen of . j ^^Is tO the pit in almOSt 

Verona, 1592-1593. i^^*^ *•• Vr tr ^ 

Venus and Adonis, evcry passage. Blood flows in truc Tcu- 
Lucfece, 1593-1594. tonic profusion ; there is no attempt to 
Richard III., 1593. conceal it ; only three of the original cast 
^Dr^^am'TiL-^sgr^ remain alive at the close of the play, and 
Sonnets, 1595-1605. Qj^e of thcse IS to bc buried alive after 

' The dates in this chapter are largely from Dowden's Primer. 
^ The date is from Lee's Shakespeare. 



Shakespeare 305 



Crudeness of His Early Work Its Growing Power 

the last speech. The lines are violently end-stopped; 
the movement is heavy ; the characters are mere figures. 
To realize Shakespeare's marvelous growth in art and 
power one has but to read in the light of his later work 
a few of even the best lines of this his earliest dramatic 
attempt. There is better work in the first part of Henry 
VL, which Shakespeare doubtless touched more or less, 
but it is thoroughly pre-Shakespearian in form and spirit. 
The first independent work of Shakespeare is found in 
his Love s Labour 's Losty the Comedy of Errors, the Two 
Gentlemen of Verona, and the Midsummer Nighf s Dream. 
Here for the first time we get an unobstructed glance at 
the young apprentice. They are just what we might ex- 
pect of a marvelously gifted, enthusiastic young play- 
wright who had had six or seven years of practical 
experience in a theater. They are, above all, the work 
of a young man who is experimenting, who has not yet 
discovered the secret of his strength. They are often 
extravagant, often full of elaborate imagery, of puns and 
rollicking wit and unbridled satire. The wild dreams 
and sensuous fancy of the poet often run to extremes. 
The Comedy of Errors is only a step removed from the 
boisterous and headlong comedy of the Gammer Gurton 
type. The plays are full of echoes. Love' s Labour 's Lost 
and the delightfully fanciful Midsummer Nighf s Dream 
are imitations, more or less direct, of the fashionable 
John Lyly. Marlowe, too, exerted an early influence. 
There is evidence that Parts II and III of Henry VL. 
were revised by Shakespeare and Marlowe working in 
collaboration. The ** mighty line " made a deep im- 
pression upon . the young playwright. Richard LH. is 
full of the spirit and style of Marlowe. Although the 



3o6 The Foundations of English Literature 

Influence of Marlowe Dramatic Work a Mere Matter of Business 

great dramatist quickly ceased to imitate, although he 
had the power of transmuting the best things of all other 
poets into forms that became peculiarly his own, yet 
there can be no question that it was Marlowe who taught 
him the secret of imparting life to blank verse. 

Shakespeare s Poems. Thus far dramatic work has been 
to Shakespeare only a matter of business. No one could 
look upon the drama as a permanent medium of literary 
expression. The young actor had helped revise and re- 
cast too many plays to hope that his own efforts would 
long retain the form that he had given them. Despite 
the fact that all classes save the Puritans patronized the 
theater, it was regarded generally as a place of ill repute. 
Its morals were more than doubtful ; its refinement was 
not far above that of the vulgar throng. Altogether it 
could not be expected to be the disseminator of perma- 
nent literature. Moreover the early plays were not 
printed. The company that bought a drama guarded it 
with care, under the impression that printed copies would 
decrease its power to draw the public. But the young 
actor had visions of a literary career. The mighty burst 
of lyric song that had opened with the first notes of 
Sidney's sonnets was swelling about him. He had 
doubtless long been experimenting with rhyme, and in 
1593 he made his ** first appeal to the reading public " 
with Venus and Adonis^ a sensuous and romantic poem 
of the type then so fashionable. That Shakespeare con- 
sidered it his first permanent literary effort there can be 
no question ; he declared in his dedication to the Earl of 
Southampton that it was the ** first heir of his inven- 
tion; " that the reading public regarded it as the poet's 
first real literary venture is attested by the burst of ap- 



Shakespeare 307 



Shakespeare Seeks Permanence Gradual Unfolding of His Powers 

plause that greeted it and the many editions through 
which it immediately ran. Even up to the great days of 
Hamlet and Macbeth, Shakespeare was chiefly praised for 
his lyric poems. Emboldened by the success of this first 
venture, the poet next published The Rape of Lucrece, 
and when the sonnet era was at its height he began a 
sequence, which, however, was not completed until later 
years. 

The Period of Growing Power, i^g4.-i6oi. In 1594 
Shakespeare was in his thirtieth year. His powers were 
reaching the full strength of manhood ; he had been 
trained by at least seven years of practical experience in 
the best playhouses of the time; he had been in constant 
contact with the brightest minds of the age ; he had been 
in touch with one of the most teeming and electric eras 
in human history. The joyous thrill of the Armada year 
had not yet subsided. The fierce Marprelate controversy 
was echoing on every hand ; the new burst of lyric song 
had just begun ; The Faerie Queene had stirred the nation's 
fancy ; Marlowe had ended his short and brilliant career ; 
the University Wits were at their best, — what univer- 
sity since the world began could offer such a seven years 
of training ? 

Despite his success with Venus and Adonis, lyric poetry 
could be only an avocation with Shakespeare. Every 
year saw him bound more closely to the theater. His 
work was becoming exceedingly profitable: in 1599 he 
became a shareholder in the new Globe Theater ; circum- 
stance had decreed that the best efforts of his life should 
be directed toward the profession that he had first chosen. 
He could not even thus early have been unconscious of 
his real power. The theater and the public had already 



3o8 The Foundations of English Literature 



His Characters Become more Lifelike He Incarnates English Types 

recognized it. His early plays, while they abounded in 
crudities, had been welcomed as something new in Eng- 
lish dramatic art. They had shown a marvelous imagi- 
nation, an increasing power of characterization, a growing 
facility in the use of language and of dramatic verse. 
During the next seven years Shakespeare reached his full 
development as a dramatic artist. It was the period of 
gradual breaking away from all traditions. His end- 
stopped lines grow fewer and fewer; his rhyming coup- 
lets steadily decrease; his comedy, though rough and 
boisterous in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry 
WiveSy grows more refined and artistic; his characters 
become more and more alive ; his blank verse, like that 
in The Merchant of Venice, becomes marvelously flexible 

and sonorous. It was the period of ma- 
Richard II., 1594. . i . 1 1 . 
King John, 1595. turing Strength, and its themes and its 

Merchant of Venice, ^^j^^g ^^^ ^jj ^]^^|. ^^ might CXpCCt of 

Romeo and Juliet, vigorous early manhood. The poet's 
1596-1597 (?). patriotism is intense ; he delights in the 

Taming of the Shrew, ^ ' ^ 

1597 (?). national heroes. How fondly he dwells 

' iT97-i598^^"'^ ^^" ^" ^^^^ ^^^^ English of sovereigns, 
Merry Wives of Henry V. ! He incamatcs English types 
MTch' Tdo'tbcut and sets them living before us. What 
Nothing, 1598. creation in his whole marvelous gallery 
Henr°y"v.! 1599.' '^^^' Hiorc lifelike than Sir John Falstaff ! 
Twelfth Night, 1600- He studies English life with the minute- 
ness of a realist, — what we know of Eliza- 
bethan tavern life we know from him. He is full of the 
mere joy of existence. His fancy, now extravagant and 
boisterous, now disciplined and refined, peoples the forest 
of Arden or ranges into Arcadia and unknown lands with 
classic names. He conceives his characters and scenes 



Shakespeare 309 



The Period of Maturity The Darkest Themes of Tragedy 

with ever-increasing power. We live with them and in 
them. Life seems a joyous, glorified holiday where 
dukes and kings and queens, clowns and boors, beautiful 
maidens and radiant lovers, join together in a world where 
all things are possible, a world that exists only in the 
dreams of healthy young manhood. 

The Period of Maturity^ 1601-1608. During the next 
seven years Shakespeare was in the fullness of his powers. 
He had now reached the point where all experiment 
ceased. His dramatic style had become spontaneous; 
he had thrown away all traditions of predecessors and 
was writing as a master. His mind had reached full 
maturity ; deep reflective power and insight into charac- 
ter had come with maturing years. He could write now 
from a large experience of human life. The workings of 
the soul, the play of motives, the chain of circumstance, 
the majesty of life, now appealed to him as they do to all 
strong and earnest men. 

It was at this point that, without apparent cause, the 
whole tone of his work suddenly changed. With the 
single exception of Romeo and Juliet, that " young man's 
achievement, the lyrical tragedy of youth, of love, of 
death," he had produced nothing but histories and joy- 
ous comedies. He now turned to the darkest themes of 
tragedy, — the hell of jealousy, of ingratitude, of ** o'er- 
weening ambition," of revenge. The seven deadly sins 
with all their attendant horrors hold high carnival, and 
the strong and the pure are helpless in their hands. Even 
his comedies became dark and ironical. As to what had 
so embittered the man we can only guess. In financial 
affairs he was prospering wonderfully. He had bought 
in 1597 the best house in his native village; he had sue- 



3IO The Foundations of English Literature 



His Financial Prosperity His Four Great Tragedies 

ceeded in 1599 in obtaining for his family a coat of arms 
and a place among the gentry; he had purchased in 
1602 one hundred and seven acres of the best land in 
Stratford, and he had shown other evidences of prosper- 
ity. But his only son had died in 1596, his friend Essex 
had gone to execution in 1602, and his early patron 
Southampton was in extreme danger. The poet com- 
plains bitterly of false friends and of fickle fortune. He 
is ** in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," he is an 
outcast, he is all alone, he despises his work, and even 
his life. 

Whatever his frame of mind, however, his work during 
Julius Caesar, 1601. thls era shows him to have been at the 
All 's Well that Ends ygj.y gummit of hls powers. His four 

Well, 1601-1602. ^ ,. , . , r ,, , , , 

Hamlet, 1602. great tragedies, which followed each other 

Measure for Measure, -^^ -^^ SUCCCSsIon, — Hamlet, Otkello, 

1603. . ^ 

Troiius and Cressida, King Lear, diVid.. Macbeth, — mark the high- 
otheuo^ieo ^^^ literary achievement of the English 

King Lear, 1605. mind, if not of the human race. 

Macbeth, 1606. 
Antony and Cleo- 
patra, 1607. Each one [says Ten Brink] has its own peculiar ex- 
Coriolanus, 1607. cellences, some points in which it surpasses the others. 
Timon of Athens, None of them can rival Hamlet in its truth to nature, 
and its wealth of psychological delineation. Othello, 
which follows directly upon Hamlet, surpasses all the others in the strength 
of its dramatic effects, culminating in the third act, which is indeed, dra- 
matically, the most thrilling act in all his writings. The succeeding tragedy, 
Macbeth, stands alone by its grand simplicity of conception and the origi- 
nality of its execution, giving us in a few bold strokes a consummate 
picture of the strange workings of a human soul. But it is in King Lear 
that the poet attains the summit of his tragic powers. Higher than in 
Lear Shakespeare could not rise. 

During all of this period Shakespeare produced no in- 
ferior work. His Julius Ccesar, Antony and Cleopatra, 



Shakespeare 311 

He Reaches His Highest Levels The Period of Calm after the Storm 

and Coriolanus are well-nigh equal in conception and 
dramatic art to his greatest masterpieces. In every line 
there is the conscious power, the marvelous skill, the 
profound knowledge of human life that Shakespeare 
alone possessed. 

The Period of Retire^nent, 1 608-161 6. With Timon of 
Athens, which doubtless was largely the work of another 
playwright, ended the period of trap;e- „ . 

r J t^ "> r S Pericles, 1608. 

dies. The four remaining plays of Shake- cymbeiine, 1609. 
speare are romantic in their themes and V"^ '^t^^T\ '^^°*, 

^ The Winter's Tale, 

happy in their endings. The atmosphere 1610-1611. 

is one of lofty serenity; it is the peace "^7^°^^°^^^ ^^"^"^^"' 

after the storm. The dramatist writes Henry viii., 1612- 

from the fullness of experience ; he has ^^^^' 

drunk life to the full, and he speaks with authority 

and precision. There is a grandeur, a compression of 

thought, a mastery of expression in parts of these plays 

that one will in vain seek for elsewhere. One has but to 

compare the best passages of his early works with this, 

for instance, from The Tempest, to realize in its fullness 

Shakespeare's marvelous growth: 

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on ; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. 

After 161 1, when he doubtless disposed of his last 
stock in the London theaters, Shakespeare spent his re- 
maining years in Stratford " in ease, retirement, and the 



312 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Last Years His Place and Influence 

conversation of his friends." If we except two fragment- 
ary plays that doubtless passed under his hand, he did no 
more dramatic work. He had won the ideal of his life 
and he cared for no more honors. The details of his last 
years have not come down to us. We know only that he 
died on April 23, 1616, and that he was buried in the 
parish church of his native town, where his bones still 
repose. 

Shakespeare' s Place and Influence. To study in detail 
the plays of Shakespeare, to dwell upon his myriad 
moods, and to analyze the elements of his dramatic art 
is not within the province of this chapter. The student 
must do this work for himself; he must study with the 
best apparatus at his command all of the leading plays, 
for no education is complete without a full knowledge of 
the best creations of the great dramatist. This chapter 
can investigate only the gradual development of Shake- 
speare from his surroundings and his era, and determine 
his place in the history of the English drama and his in- 
fluence upon his successors. 

It must be realized first of all that Shakespeare was a 
natural development; that he was not a supernatural 
genius who arose unheralded and unaccounted for, — an 
inspired peasant who warbled spontaneously his ** native 
wood-notes wild. ' ' The contrast between the poet's birth 
and early training and the marvelous creations of his 
later years is so great that many sober critics have taken 
refuge in the theory that Lord Bacon, and not Shake- 
speare, wrote the plays, a theory that seems to us not 
worth refuting. Others have accepted Shakespeare as a 
pure and unaccountable genius, like Morphy, the chess 
player, or Colburn, the mathematician. But there is no 



Shakespeare 3 1 3 



Shakespeare a Natural Evolution A Blend of the Celt and Teuton 

need of such subterfuges. Shakespeare was only one re- 
sult of a great literary movement. The same forces that 
produced him produced a score of other dramatists of 
almost equal magnitude. He is only the loftiest peak in 
a great mountain range which was elevated all at once by 
the same primal impulse. That he surpassed all of his 
contemporaries was due wholly to the harmonious blend- 
ing of the elements of his nature. There was scarcely a 
dramatist of the era but what equaled or even surpassed 
him at some one point. In Shakespeare the elements of 
strength were evenly balanced. 

The circumstances of his early life need not trouble us. 
His family was by no means of peasant blood ; the Ardens 
had at one time been prominent among the gentry. 
From his mother the poet inherited a sensitive and re- 
fined nature; from his father he received the practical 
and active temperament that served as a balance to his 
poetic side. He was a perfect blend of the Celtic and 
the Teutonic elements. He had the sensitive, sympa- 
thetic, intuitive nature of the Celt, and it was this that 
made him the ** sweetest Shakespeare," the man idolized 
by his contemporaries, and that allowed him to project 
himself into the lives of others, to feel intensely their 
joys, their passions, their woes. He had the fancy, the 
lightness, the humor, the nervous energy of the Celt, 
but blended with it all he had the masculine vigor, the 
serious, often gloomy, outlook, the hard common sense 
of the Teuton. It is hard to say which element predom- 
inates in the poet. The Midsummer Nighf s Dream is all 
Celtic, but Macbeth may be compared even with Beowulf 
as to its Teutonism. There is no squeamishness about 
the poet ; blood flows freely even in his best tragedies : 



314 The Foundations of English Literature 

A Symmetrically Developed Man His Dramatic Art no Accident 

Hamlet ends almost as bloodily as does Titus Andronicus 
and the pre-Shakespearian tragedies. It was the perfect 
blending of these two diverse elements that gave him his 
power. 

Moreover, Shakespeare's education need not trouble 
us. He lived during the active period of his life amid an 
environment that was tenfold better than any university, 
and the marvelous epoch of which he was a part de- 
veloped him, unlike so many of his contemporaries, sym- 
metrically. It created in him no theories; it placed him 
upon no hobbies. His very lack of a university course 
tended to make him more sane and tolerant. 

His dramatic art was no accident; it grew from a long 
practical experience with the stage and a careful study 
of the public wants. He threw himself with all his Teu- 
tonic energy into his chosen profession. The youth 
who at twenty-two was penniless and unkhown in a vast 
city, at thirty -three was able to purchase the best estate 
in his native town, to procure for his family a patent of 
nobility, and to win the patronage of royalty itself. 
This alone is enough to show the intensity with which he 
had practiced his profession. He was first of all a prac- 
tical, studious, hard-working caterer to the wants of the 
theater-going public. It was the ruling thought of his 
whole life to make his every line count upon his audi- 
ences, to hold his hearers within his grasp, and to move 
them as he would. As an actor in his own plays he had 
a chance to study the effect of his work ; his characters 
stood living before him in the persons of his fellow-play- 
ers; it was as if he wrote with his characters actually in 
the flesh about him and in the presence of his audience. 
To do this was to make a successful play, and success- 



Shakespeare 3 1 5 

His Knowledge of Human Life His Use of External Nature 

ful plays meant increased income, a worthy home for his 
declining years, and the honor and respect of all men. 

His marvelous grasp upon the meaning of life, his in- 
sight into human character, and his knowledge of every 
round of human experience came from his quick sympathy 
and intuition and his wide acquaintance with gifted men 
in an era of great intellectual activity. His knowledge of 
external nature, of country life and scenes, came from his 
early experiences at Stratford. He was an accurate ob- 
server, and he knew the birds and flowers as well as did 
Chaucer. He is seldom at fault in his descriptions and 
allusions, but to him external nature was but the back- 
ground for the play of human character, and in the ab- 
sence of all scenery on the early stage he elaborated his 
backgrounds with peculiar minuteness and care. Nature 
is ever in sympathy with the action. Lovers ever woo 
in the moonlight amid the flowers ; murderers ever work 
at midnight to the accompaniment of the owl and the 
storm. 

The influence of Shakespeare upon later literature can 
hardly be estimated. He created no sudden revolution ; 
he was no literary dictator like his contemporary, Jonson. 
He illustrates perfectly the old fable of the contest be- 
tween the wind and the sun. His contemporaries, who 
were all men of broader education, did not dream of his 
transcendent superiority, and he took no pains to impress 
it upon them. 

He was " gentle Shakespeare " to them [declares Gosse], and they loved 
both the man and his poetry. That he excelled them at every point, as 
the oak excels the willow, this, had it been whispered at the Mermaid, 
would have aroused smiles of derision, ... It must not be forgotten 
that his works made no definite appeal to the reading class until after his 



3i6 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Influence of His Work Three Centuries of Shakespeare 

death. The study of "Shakespeare " as a book cannot date farther back 
than 1623. 

But the quiet, pervasive influence of Shakespeare's 
work told upon the playgoing public. After a taste of 
his marvelous dramas it was impossible to satisfy them 
with anything else. Jonson might propound with vigor 
his learned theories ; it was the sun working silently and 
gently that won. After Hamlet^ Othello, Macbeth, and 
Lear, it was impossible for the English stage to develop 
anything but the strong romantic drama. 

Three Centuries of Shakespeare. During the centuries 
since the close of the Elizabethan era Shakespeare has 
had a varied career. The Restoration stage preferred 
its drama in the French style ; Shakespeare was altered 
and " improved " remorselessly. During the classic 
** Augustan period " the great dramatist was looked 
upon as a ** rude and Gothic genius " who sang ** wood- 
notes wild," but who sadly needed polish. In the 
middle of the eighteenth century David Garrick, the 
actor, began his revival of the old dramatist, which soon 
resulted in a ** Shakespeare fever." Soon afterwards 
began the era of Shakespearian scholars, — Dr. Johnson, 
Capell, Steevens, Malone, and others, — who industriously 
collected every scrap of textual information. It was not 
until 1 8 14, however, when Coleridge began his celebrated 
series of lectures, that modern Shakespearian criticism, 
which is constructive and sympathetic, may be said to 
have begun. Since then Shakespeare has been the 
supreme figure in English literature. The Germans 
have studied his plays as if they were a part of the phe- 
nomena of Nature herself, and the English have written 
voluminously upon every phase of his work. The growth 



Shakespeare 3 1 7 

Supreme Figure in English Literature His Characterization of Brutus 

of Shakespeare as an educating power has been constant 
all through the present century, until to-day he is studied 
by every schoolboy, and his works, in annotated editions 
for every possible use, are like leaves in the autumn 
forests. 

Such was Shakespeare. It is impossible for us to do 
more than introduce him to the reader. He is in him- 
self a literature, and to treat adequately his art and his 
personality would require volumes. Yet no amount of 
criticism could describe the man better than he has done 
himself in his comment upon Brutus in Julius Ccesar : 

His life was gentle, and the elements 

So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up 

And say to all the world, " This was a Man ! " 

Required Reading. The minimum reading of Shake- 
speare should include Romeo and Juliet^ A Midsummer 
Night's Dreamy The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, 
The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Winter s Tale, Richard 
III,, Henry V., Julius Ccesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, King 
Lear, Othello, and The Tempest, 



CHAPTER XXII 

BEN JONSON AND HIS CIRCLE 

He stands alone, colossal, iron-jointed, the behemoth of the 
drama. — Symonds. 

THE years between 1593 and 1616 are so filled with the 
radiance of Shakespeare that we are liable to forget 
that other dramatists of originality and power were at 
work during the same era. The same conditions that 
had produced the master dramatist produced, as we have 
already remarked, a school of playwrights whose produc- 
tions, even had there arisen no Shakespeare, would have 
made the age a glorious one. Contemporary criticism 
was unjust to Shakespeare. He won the hearts of the 
people with his romantic creations, but the scholars of 
the period, the literary critics and dramatic experts, by 
no means awarded to him the preeminent place that he 
has since gained. The real literary master of the age, the 
culmination of correct dramatic art, was, almost by ac- 
clamation of the critics, the ponderous Ben Jonson. Near 
him in learned esteem stood the classic Chapman and the 
more romantic Dekker, Heywood, and Marston. It 
was this group of dramatists that, with Marlowe and 
Shakespeare, made the golden age of the Elizabethan 
drama. 

/. Ben Jonson (iS73-i6jy) 

Authorities. The standard edition of Jonson has long 
been Gifford's, first issued in 18 16; more modern and 

318 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 319 

The Contrast between Shakespeare and Jonson Jonson's Teutonic Traits 

helpful editions, however, are those by Nicholson and 
Herford (Mermaid Series) and by Cunningham. The 
Notes of Ben Jonson s Conversations with William Drnm- 
fnond of Hawthornden (Shakespeare Society) is the chief 
original authority on the life of the poet ; the most help- 
ful recent life is Symonds' in English Worthies Series. 
Swinburne, Study of Ben Jonson, a somewhat glowing 
picture ; Bell, The Poems of Robert Greene, Christopher 
Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, and Schelling, Ben Jonson s 
Timber, are valuable helps. 

Never was there a more perfect contrast than that be- 
tween the two leading dramatists of the Elizabethan age. 
They were results of precisely the same general condi- 
tions, they received their dramatic experience in the 
same school; they did their strongest work during the 
same decade ; yet the plays of Jonson, while just as origi- 
nal as those of Shakespeare, belong to an utterly different 
world. The early life of the two poets was radically dif- 
ferent. The childhood and youth of Jonson were spent in 
London. While Shakespeare was studying the fields and 
the birds, country types and scenes, Jonson was threading 
the narrow streets of the great metropolis, noting its 
teeming life and its curious personages; or was receiving 
at the hands of the scholar Cambden the beginnings of 
a ponderous education. Unlike Shakespeare, his tem- 
perament was prevailingly Teutonic. He was irascible, 
overbearing, intolerant; he lacked the quick sympathy 
and the Celtic intuition of his elder brother in the Muse; 
he was large of limb, muscular, and in later life unwieldy 
and unhealthy of body ; he drank with Teutonic freedom ; 
his appetite was enormous. Shakespeare's imagination 
was quick and restless ; he seldom blotted a line ; he threw 
off his work almost carelessly. Jonson elaborated his 



320 The Foundations of English Literature 

He Despises the Stage A Man Born for Strife 

lines slowly and with extreme labor; he spent weeks and 
months in the planning of his work and the careful per- 
fecting of its parts. Shakespeare threw his heart and 
soul into his chosen profession ; he studied his audiences, 
and with marvelous intuition built up a dramatic art that 
would appeal to them at every point : Jonson hated the 
people and the popular stage, and he abandoned them at 
the first opportunity. He would not, longer than he could 
help, make himself ** a page to that strumpet the stage." 
To him the audience was ** the beast, the multitude. 
They love nothing that is right and proper. " He would 
not please them ; he would educate them to like what 
they should. People go to the theaters to be amused 
not to be educated, and it is not strange that Jonson's 
plays never succeeded. All of his work for the popular 
stage, he once declared, netted him scarce ;^200. Shake- 
speare is ever the " gentle Shakespeare " with his con- 
temporaries; he figures not at all in any of the fierce 
controversies of the era ; his theories of dramatic art he 
never formulated; his fellow-artists he never criticised: 
but a wild battle raged about Jonson during his whole 
career. 

He was born for strife. In his youth he had run away 
from his stepfather, who would make of him a bricklayer, 
and had joined the army in the Netherlands, where" he 
had in face of both campes, killed ane enemie and taken 
opima spolia from him." Later, after returning to Eng- 
land and joining a theater company, he had slain in a 
duel a fellow-actor, for which crime he had narrowly 
escaped the gallows. He would be master wherever he 
went; he would say the last word concerning literary 
art; " but his rivals," says Minto, " had too much 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 321 

He Adheres to the Unities of Aristotle His Work Perfect in Construction 

respect for themselves to give way absolutely to his 
authority. They refused to be as grasshoppers in his 
sight," and the result we know. He carried on a wordy 
war with Dekker, and he even used personal violence 
upon Marston. 

His Period of Dramatic Work, Jonson was doubtless 
drawn into dramatic work much as was Shakespeare. He 
began as an editor of old plays, and as a collaborator with 
other playwrights. His first significant comedy, Every 
Man in His Humour^ was first acted in 1596, and follow- 
ing this there appeared before 1616, which closed his first 
dramatic period, no less than nine prominent comedies 
and two tragedies. His conception of the drama was far 
different from Shakespeare's. He defended with vigor 
the canons of Aristotle; from his earliest prologue in 
Every Man in His Humour to the last pages of his Timber 
he insisted upon a rigid observance of the dramatic unities. 
But Jonson was not a man to follow long the leadership 
of a master, even though he were Aristotle himself. His 
comedy was a new creation, neither classical nor romantic. 
He took the classic stage properties and traditions and 
re-created them even as Shakespeare re-created the 
romantic drama. His work is true, in a degree, to the 
unities, especially the unity of time; it is carefully elabo- 
rated in plot, and it is skillfully combined. Its accumu- 
lation of incident, its movement of characters, and its 
studied organic unity are well-nigh perfect. He took 
all of his materials from contemporary low life ; he made 
his own plots; he studied, with all the minute pains of a 
realist, every type of 

Shark, squire, impostor, many persons more 
"Whose manners, now called humours, feed the s*;age. 



32 2 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Delineation of Humors All His Characters Extremes 

It is the delineation of these humors, these personal 
peculiarities, " extravagant habits, passions, or affecta- 
tions " of the low classes that makes up the comedy of 
Jonson. His two earliest titles strike the keynote of all 
his work; every man is in his own humor during the 
first four acts of the comedy, and, as Minto remarks, out 
of his humor in the last act. In other words, each 
character has his own distinguishing mark which we 
never for a moment are allowed to forget, — he is a miser, 
a hypocrite, a glutton, a parasite, a quack, a shrew, and 
throughout the whole comedy he emphasizes with every 
action and word his ruling passion. The glutton does 
nothing but eat and talk of eating; the miser never 
thinks or speaks of anything but gold; the hypocrite 
never for an instant forgets his whine and his pious cant. 
The various humors triumph during the first four acts : 
the impostors dupe all who meet them; the scoundrels 
have nothing but success ; but all receive poetic justice in 
the last act. All the characters are extremes. Volpone, 
the aged miser, who feigns mortal sickness that his pos- 
sible heirs may bring him presents ; Morose, the churlish 
old misanthrope of The Silent Woman^ who is morbidly 
sensitive to noise ; the miserly Mannon in The Alchemist ; 
the hypocritical Puritan, Zeal-of-the-Hand Busy in Bar- 
tholomew Fair, and indeed every character the poet has 
drawn is an impossible creature, a mere caricature of 
humanity. Jonson's object in such extreme pictures 
was to make vice and shams detested by simply showing 
them in exaggerated forms. But caricature never re- 
forms; mere distortion can only provoke curiosity and 
mirth. Jonson saw only the outside of things; his lack 
of intuition and sympathy made him a mere painter of 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 323 

His Satire The First Poet Laureate 

grotesque masks. Of the struggles of the soul and the 
motives of the heart he never dreamed. He is rather a 
satirist; his wit is brilliant but it leaves a cruel sting. 
" He had," says Lowell, ** a keen and ready eye for the 
comic in situation, but no humor." He sneers at 
humanity ; we laugh at his creations, never with them ; 
they are mere figures in hideous disguises, that fail to 
move us by their very grotesqueness. In his superabun- 
dance of characters and his caricature-like creations he 
reminds us of Dickens, but the great novelist possessed 
the sympathy and the toleration that gave life to his 
characters, distorted though they sometimes are, while 
Jonson seldom made anything but wooden figures. 

Jonson twice attempted tragedy, but with small suc- 
cess. Sejanus and Catiline are studies in Roman history, 
passionless and unsympathetic. They do not appeal to 
the hopes and fears of humanity ; they are learned and 
classical; they have all the accuracy and coldness of a 
marble frieze. 

At Court. In 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, 
there opened a new era in the life of Jonson. He was 
granted a pension by the Crown and he ^^^ laureates. 
was made poet laureate, an honor offi- 1616-1637. Ben jonson. 
cially s^iven for the first time. During ^^37-1668. wiiiiam 

•^ ^ , , . ^ Davenant. 

the next ten years he wrote only for 1670-1688. John Dry. 
aristocratic circles. He addressed lyrics '^^"• 

1689-1692. Thomas 

and epigrams to noble patrons, he made shadweii. 



songs in various keys, he created large ^692-1715. 



N ahu m 



Tate. 



numbers of masques which were given 1715-1718. Nicholas 
elaborate stage settings by such artists as ^^^^' 

o -o J 1718-1730. Lawrence 

Inigo Jones, and performed before the Eusden. 

king and his court, and he wrote his two ^^^-^J^?. coiieycib- 



324 The Foundations of English Literature 



" O Rare Ben Jonson " Jonson's Lyrics 

1757-1785. William bcautiful apostfophcs to Shakespeare, 
1785-1790/ Thorn as whlch are now doubtless the most widely 

warton. knowii of all his works. During this era 

'XinesPye. ^^^^ he bccame the recognized leader of Eng- 
1813-1843. Robert lish poets, the first of that line of literary 
i843°-^85o.^ w i 1 1 i a m kings whose best-known representatives 

Wordsworth. j^ later years are Dryden and Dr. Johnson. 

nyson. TAe Last Period of his Life, which dates 

1894 — . Alfred Aus- from 1625, was sad in the extreme. His 

tin. . 

irregular life had given him an enormous, 
** tun-like body," inflicted with many infirmities. The 
death of James had for several years deprived him of his 
usual income, and he turned again to his old profession 
for support. But his later comedies added little to his 
fame or fortune; all that he did during these declining 
years must rank among '' his dotages." He held for a 
time a minor ofifice in London, but he soon lost even 
this and troubles gathered thickly about him. Palsied, 
dropsical, bedridden, he passed his last days almost 
alone. He died on the 6th of August, 1637, and was 
buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. In 
later years a stranger in the city, noticing the unmarked 
slab over his grave, gave orders for the simple inscrip- 
tion, ** O rare Ben Jonson." 

His Style and Rank, Jonson's masques are sometimes 
light and graceful, and in connection with the gorgeous 
settings amid which they first appeared they doubtless 
were really charming. But much of their beauty has 
evaporated since the days of their first triumphs, and to 
most readers now they are dull and spiritless. The little 
lyrics, however, scattered everywhere among them, are 
often of dainty finish. It was as a lyrist that Jonson 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 325 

A Realist Among the Romanticists Jonson's Excellences 

came the nearest to true spontaneous art. His epigrams 
are marvels of compression, and such songs as " It is 
not growing like a tree," and ** Drink to me only with 
thine eyes," and " For love's sake kiss me once again," 
prepared the way for such lyric masters as Herrick. 

As a dramatist Jonson marks the first significant symp- 
tom of the reaction against the imaginative school, and 
he thus became the parent of the dramatists of the Res- 
toration. He appealed to the intellect rather than to the 
imagination and the feelings. Among the romanticists 
he was a realist in the modern sense of the term. He 
sought not for the beautiful and the ideal but for the 
repulsive and the disgusting, and he pictured them 
faithfully from every standpoint. He was material rather 
than spiritual, and thus he struck the first note of deca- 
dence. He would have had Shakespeare blot a thousand 
lines, but he loved the man and would not have dreamed 
of actually doing the blotting himself. It was but a step 
to the generation that actually did blot the thousand 
lines and more. 

Jonson's excellences lay in his constructive power, his 
perfection of plot, and his ingenuity of intellect ; in the 
vast range of his learning and his observation, and in his 
perfect sincerity and honesty. He was, in the words of 
Crofts, 

a great, high-minded spirit, of high standards, shocked with the immorality 
of his time, longing to be its teacher ; showing the bad effects of his 
divorce from his age in the pompous-pedantic tone, the consciousness with 
which he enunciates sentiments whose morality he knows will strike un- 
pleasantly a popular audience, in the brutal coarseness of some of his 
plays, when contemporary manners are represented at their worst in order 
to point a moral. 

The courage, the vigor and manliness of Jonson which 



326 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Mermaid Inn Wit-Combats between Shakespeare and Jonson 

crushed all opposition by sheer force, his vast intellect, 
and his marvelous industry will ever endear him to all 
who love the English character. 

The Mermaid Inn. The life of Jonson brings before us 
for the first time an institution that was to play an in- 
creasing part in the development of English literature. 
There were no clubs in Elizabethan days, but their places 
were amply supplied by the inns, where gathered night 
after night merry bands of congenial spirits. The Mer- 
maid early became the headquarters of actors and play- 
wrights. Here, evening after evening, gathered that 
immortal band headed by Shakespeare and Jonson, Hey- 
wood and Marston and Fletcher, to hold contests both 
wet and witty, which there was no Boswell to record. 

Many were the wit-combats [wrote Fuller in his Worthies^ 'twixt him 
and Ben Jonson, which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an 
English man of war ; Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher 
in learning, solid but slow in his performances ; Shakespear, with the 
English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with 
all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of 
his wit and invention. 

Beaumont, in a letter to Jonson, thus described the 
meetings in this famous hostelry : 

What things we have seen 
Done at the Mermaid ? heard words that have been 
So nimble and so full of subtle flame 
As if every one from whence they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life. 

In later years Jonson frequented other inns, — the Sun, 
the Dog, the Triple Tun. But it was the old Devil 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 327 

The " Tribe of Ben " George Chapman 

Tavern at Temple Bar where he so long ruled the Apollo 
Club as literary dictator. Here he gathered about him 
the ** Tribe of Ben," a band of young writers and men 
of station who hung breathless upon his words, men who 
were to be rulers during the next literary era, — Herrick, 
Suckling, Brome, Cartwright, Field, Howell, and many 
others. 

The era of the inn and the coffee-house did not end 
until after the days of the Old Cheshire Cheese and the 
reign of Samuel Johnson. For a century and more the 
public house was to be a dominating element in English 
literature. 

Required Reading. The best comedies of Jonson are 
Every Man in His Humour (in the London Series, and 
Temple Dramatists), The Alchemist (in Thayer's Best 
Elizabethan Plays), Volpone the Fox, and The Silent 
Woman. The student should read at least the first two, 
the poems eulogizing Shakespeare, and a selection of 
lyrics from Underwoods. 

2. George Chapman (iS59 f-i6j^) 

Authorities. Shepherd, Chapman s Plays, and Phelps, 
Best Plays of ChapmaJt, in Mermaid Series, and Swin- 
burne, The Poems and Minor Translations of Chapman, 
are the most helpful editions. Swinburne, George Chap- 
man : An Essay, and Lowell's essay in Old English 
Dramatists are suggestive and helpful studies. Snep- 
herd's translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey is an 
excellent edition of Chapman s Homer. See also Mat- 
thew Arnold's essay On Translating Homer. 

To the majority of readers Chapman is known only as 
the translator of Homer and the inspirer of Keats' ex- 
quisite sonnet. Had he done nothing besides this trans- 
lation he would still be a large figure in the Elizabethan 



328 The Foundations of English Literature 

Little Known of His Life A Ponderous and Reflective Marlowe 

age, but he was a dramatist as well, and a popular one, 
even in the days of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. His 
life is almost unknown. He was born in Kent, he was 
educated in both universities, and he first appeared in 
London in 1594. In the following year he produced 
with Jonson and Marston a play entitled Eastward Ho ! 
which, on account of certain reflections upon the Scotch, 
brought its authors for a time into prison. Again in 
1606 he was forced to flee from the wrath of the French 
ambassador, who had been greatly offended by The Duke 
of Biron. We know little else concerning the dramatist 
save the dates of his plays and a few contemporary 
allusions. 

As a Dramatist Chapman may be described as a ponder- 
ous and reflective Marlowe. His genius was epic rather 
than dramatic. He loved a brilliant hero, one of colossal 
mold : 

Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea 
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind, 
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, 
And his rapt ship run on her side so low 
That she drinks water and her keel plows air. 
There is no danger to a man who knows 
What life and death is. 

He delighted in stirring deeds on land and sea. His 
tragedies are the lives of heroes who, like Tamburlaine, 
go from triumph to triumph. The minor actors are ob- 
scured in the fierce light shed on the central figure. 
There is little attempt at character analysis ; there is no 
laying bare of the heart and the soul, but everywhere 
there is a striving after the grand and the extraordinary. 
Webster speaks of Chapman's ** full and heightened 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 329 

His " Full and Heightened Style " Best Read in Selections 

style," and indeed there are places in his dramas that are 
free-aired and vast, that thrill and exhilarate us with their 
force and sweep. But he sometimes, like Marlowe, goes 
beyond safe limits and makes mere bombast. He sought, 
in his own words, to 

Shun common and plebeian forms of speech. 

But he had not the passion and the lightness of touch of 
his younger rival. He had more restraint; he was pon- 
derous and didactic. He had learned from Jonson that 
a drama should teach a lesson, and accordingly he is often 
tedious and pedantic. He was by nature grave and 
speculative; Wood mentions him as a ** person of most 
reverend aspect, religious and temperate." His extrav- 
agance came by flashes; his dramas are not, like Mar- 
lowe's, all of a piece; no writer was ever more uneven. 
He describes with vigor and fire a duel with six contest- 
ants, and at the critical moment when it seems as if the 
hero will prove to be the sole surviving victor, he pauses 
for a long Homeric simile. It is for this reason that he 
is best read in selections ; there are passages in his works 
that equal anything produced during the whole period, 
but the dramas as a whole are of inferior merit. They 
are full, as Dryden remarked, of ** dwarfish thought 
dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in abundance, 
looseness of expression, and gross hyperbole, the sense 
of one line prodigiously expanded into ten." 

His comedy falls below his tragedy. He was superior 
to Jonson in force and fire, but he lacked his master's 
comic vein and his skill and constructive power. 

Nearly all of his comedies [says Lowell] are formless and coarse, but 



330 The Foundations of English Literature 



His Lack of Humor and His Coarseness Chapman's Translation of Homer 

with what seems to me a kind of stiff and willful coarseness, as if he were 
trying to make his personages speak in what he supposed to be their 
proper dialect, in which he himself was unpracticed, having never learned 
it in those haunts, familiar to most of his fellow-poets, where it was ver- 
nacular. . . . He thought he was being comic, and there is, on the 
whole, no more depressing sight than a naturally grave man under that 
delusion. 



He constantly depreciated woman, and he invariably 
dealt with the baser motives and passions. All Fools y 
one of his early titles, might, as Minto remarks, be 
given as the title to all of his comedies. Not one charac- 
ter in them rises above the ignoble level. 

Chapman s Homer. It was in his translation of Homer 
that Chapman did by far his best work. The epic bent 
of his nature found in Homer a congenial field, and he 
threw himself with his whole soul into the translation. 
He believed that he had been born to accomplish this 
one task. He brought to Homer the Elizabethan view 
of life, its humors and its fantasticalities, its freedom and 
its exuberance, its lyric inspiration, its unbounded youth 
and hope. He brought his own poetic peculiarities, his 
love of action, of the sea, of the deeds of heroes. He 
took unwarranted liberties with the text; he twisted it 
everywhere to conform to his own personality and ideals; 
he expanded and changed the similes, and added what- 
ever and whenever he pleased. The result was a work 
that Coleridge declared ** as truly an original poem as The 
Faerie Queene. It will," he adds, ** give you small 
idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's 
epigrams or Cowper's cumbersome, most anti-Homeric 
Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet, as 
Homer might have written had he lived in England in 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 331 

A True Elizabethan Epic Minor Dramatists of the Earlier School 

the reign of Queen Elizabeth." Assuredly it is not 
Homer as some have maintained. " I confess," says 
Matthew Arnold, " that I can never read twenty lines of 
Chapman's version without recurring to Bentley's cry, 
* This is not Homer. ' ' ' Yet the great critic freely admits 
that Chapman is " plain-spoken, fresh, vigorous, and 
to a certain degree rapid, and all these are Homeric 
qualities." 

It is not too much to claim for Chapman's translation 
what the poet himself would not for a moment have 
admitted: that it is well-nigh an original creation and 
that it comes nearer to being a native Elizabethan epic 
than anything else written during the era. It came at 
the very flood-tide of the creative period, when the air was 
full of music and electric with creative energy. If it is 
not a distinct and original epic, it nevertheless is Homer 
set to the marvelous Elizabethan music. 

Required Reading. At least one book of Chapman's 
Homer; also Keats' sonnet "On First Looking into Chap- 
man's Homer." 

J. Thomas Heywood (1581 f -164.0 ? ) 

Authorities. Pearson, The Works of Heywood, 6 
vols. ; Best Plays of Heywood and of Decker, Mermaid 
Series; Dramatic Works of Tho7nas Dekker (London, 
1873); Marston s Works in Bullen's English Dramatists, 
3 vols. 

Among the minor dramatists of the earlier days who 
began their work with Shakespeare and Jonson, and who 
belong to the same original and spontaneous school, the 
most conspicuous are Heywood, Marston, and Dekker. 
Of none of them have we more than the fragments of a 



332 The Foundations of English Literature 

Thomas Heywood His Sympathetic Pictures of Humble Life 

biography. They are mere names, vague shadows that 
flit through the era, leaving nothing of their personaHty 
and history save what may be gathered from their dramas. 
They grew, Hke Shakespeare, from the popular stage; 
they were taught by Marlowe and the University Wits, 
and unlike Jonson they followed romantic models. 
While they sometimes did exceedingly well, while in 
some things they approached the great master of the 
epoch, they had not his symmetry of power, his all- 
embracing intuition, his artistic sense, his knowledge of 
life. They are, taken for all in all, distinctly minor 
figures when we compare them with Shakespeare ; they 
made no significant addition to the drama as he left it; 
they contributed not even to the decline of the period, 
and consequently we need not examine closely their 
work. A study of Heywood, who may be taken as a 
type of this whole school of dramatists, will show their 
prevailing characteristics, their mastery of certain phases 
of dramatic art, their fatal defects. 

The chief merit of Heywood lies in his mastery of 
pathos and his power to depict scenes and characters in 
humble life. He delighted in rural pictures, in the de- 
lineation of country types and customs, — in touching 
stories of love amid humble surroundings. Nowhere, 
not even in Shakespeare, do we get nearer to the cottage 
hearth, and the picture is ever tender and sympathetic, 
for Heywood was " the gentlest of all poets that have 
swept the chords of passion." He had none of Mar- 
ston's fierce satire, or his blood and thunder: 



We use no drum nor trumpet, nor dumb show ; 
As song, dance, masque, to bombast out a play. 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 333 

His Powerful Passages His Pathos and Intensity 

he declares in his English Traveller ; he has none of Jon- 
son's cynicism or Chapman's depreciation of woman. 
His characters are charming and simple ; we feel even for 
the guilty ones ; there are times when we see the very 
soul of the victim. The agony of Frankford in A Woman 
Killed with Kindness, when he discovers the faithlessness 
of his wife : 

O God ! O God ! that it were possible 

To undo things done ; to call back yesterday ! 

That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass, 

To untell the days, and to redeem these hours ! 

Or that the sun 

Could, rising from the west, draw his coach backward, 

Take from the account of time so many minutes 

Till he had all these seasons called again, 

Those minutes, and those actions done in them, 

Even from her first offense ; that I might take her 

As spotless as an angel in my arms ! 

But, oh ! I talk of things impossible 

And cast beyond the moon ; 

the grief of Bess in The Fair Maid of the West when 
compelled to part with the picture of her love whom she 
believes to be dead : 

thou, the perfect semblance of my love 
And all that 's left of him, take one sweet kiss 
As my last sad farewell ! Thou resemblest him 
For whose sweet safety I was every morning 
Down on my knees, and with the lark's sweet tunes 

1 did begin my prayers ; and when sad sleep 

Had charmed all eyes, when none save the bright stars 
"Were up and waking, I remembered thee ; 

and many other passages come in pathos and intensity 
very near to Shakespeare's level. Dekker alone can 



334 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Lack of Sustained Power ' ' A Prose Shakespeare " 

stand with Heywood, after Shakespeare, as a delineator 
of grief and tenderness and as an interpreter of the 
feminine heart. 

Where Heywood failed was in sustained dramatic art. 
He could not follow the gradual unfolding of character. 
His personages act often without sufficient motive : the 
wife of Frankford, a faithful and charming creature, 
yields suddenly to crime for no apparent reason. The 
plays are extremely uneven. Often through a whole 
drama, as in The Wise Woman of Hogsden, we find nothing 
that moves us. We are interested ; the story is well told, 
but there is no passion, no appeal to the deeper emotions. 
The poetry has been omitted ; we think of Lamb's criti- 
cism of Heywood as " a sort of prose Shakespeare. ' ' Had 
the poet been able to maintain himself at the heights that 
he sometimes reached ; had he studied more carefully the 
heart-life of his characters at every point as the play de- 
veloped, instead of only at the periods of crisis ; had he 
striven more for unity of plot and characterization, — he 
might have raised himself far above the minor figures 
among whom he now moves. 

Despite his defects, however, despite the blots that 
ever and anon disfigure his work, Heywood is a thor- 
oughly enjoyable writer. It is often a sore task to read 
Jonson; one positively rebels before some of Chapman's 
work, — but no one can despise Heywood. Whatever he 
does, he never fails to interest. He has a dash of romance 
and adventure, a collection of interesting characters, a 
touch of pathos and of sentiment that are irresistible. 
We come to love the man and to name his plays among 
our favorite books to be read more than once. To the 
average reader, who cares nothing for the critics. The 



Ben Jonson and His Circle 335 



The Fair Maid of the West 



Fair Maid of the West, despite its defects, is worth more 
than Jonson's whole repertory. 

Required Reading. A Woman Killed with Kindness 
is Heywood's strongest play, but many will find more 
delightful the first part of The Fair Maid of the West 
(Mermaid Series). 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA 

NOTHING in English literary history is more marvel- 
ous than the story of the sudden rise, the rapid 
maturity, the transcendent achievements, and the quick 
decay of the Elizabethan drama. It was a period of 
scarce fifty years, sharply defined at its beginning by the 
earliest work of Marlowe and at its end by the sudden 
cessation of all dramatic work in 1642 when the theaters 
were closed by the Puritans. It was a period of enormous 
production. The crowd of playwrights and the mass of 
plays that meet the investigator are almost bewildering. 
It is like the enormous flood of novels that has filled our 
present era, with the important difference that only a 
comparatively small number of the Elizabethan dramas 
were ever printed. Heywood's extant works comprise 
some twenty-three plays, but we have his own word in 
the introduction to his English Traveller that the play 
was one out of two hundred and twenty in which he had 
** had either an entire hand or at least a whole finger.'* 
Many plays disappeared even during the lifetime of their 
authors. 

True it is [declares Heywood] that my plays are not exposed unto the 
world in volumes, to bear the title of works (as others) ; one reason is that 
many of them by shifting and change of companies have been negligently 
lost ; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors, who 
think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in print, and a 
third that it never was any great ambition in me, to be in this kind volumi- 
nously read. 

336 



The Decline of the Drama 337 

The Frequency of Collaboration Four Distinct Dramatic Periods 

Many plays have come to us in a garbled and fragmen- 
tary condition. Reporters were often sent to the theater 
to take down for publication as best they could the words 
of a successful but closely guarded play. Many excellent 
dramas are anonymous, preserved by accident or by the 
tradition that they were the work of Shakespeare. 
Arden of Faversham, Edward III., and The Merry Devil 
of Edmonton are conspicuous examples. 

A large number of the plays are collaborations. We 
are seldom sure that a play was the individual work of a 
single writer. Often three or four worked in unison. 
The greater part of Dekker's productions bear evidence 
of other hands; Ford and Webster constantly assisted 
other playwrights ; Fletcher worked with Shakespeare on 
Henry VIIL, and perhaps on Two Noble Kinsmen ; Mar- 
lowe helped compose Henry VL, and Beaumont and 
Fletcher worked together until they became " the twin 
stars of the English literary firmament." This practice 
of collaboration gives a surprising uniformity to the Eliza- 
bethan drama. The constant revision of older works, 
often by several playwrights, the constant dwelling to- 
gether of dramatists, the frequency of joint production, 
and the surprising lack of interest which writers took in 
their own creations tended to bring the drama to a dead 
level of excellence. 

Notwithstanding the shortness of the era four distinct 
phases may be detected in it : first, the period of transi- 
tion from the old types of tragedy and comedy to the 
new forms of Shakespeare and Jonson ; second, the period 
of culmination, the golden era of spontaneous and lavish 
production; third, the period of premeditated creation, 
of dramatic art which was the result of a careful study of 



33^ The Foundations of English Literature 

The National Decline under James The Puritans and the Drama 

models from the earlier school; and last, the period of 
rapid decline. 

In reality the decadence began during the lifetime of 
Shakespeare. The first rapturous outburst of creative 
energy which so filled the last years of Elizabeth sub- 
sided almost as suddenly as it began. Reaction was 
inevitable. The rank growth of immorality, of superficial- 
ity in all things, of inordinate vanity, and of ruinous 
luxury was beginning to bear abundant fruit. There was 
a marked decline in the national life, and the new sover- 
eign, who had inherited the Tudor ideals without the 
Tudor force to animate them, was partly responsible. 
Narrow, pedantic, cowardly, he did not impress, as Eliza- 
beth had done, the national imagination. He was im- 
measurably inferior to her at almost every point. He 
was weak and wavering ; his foreign policy lost for Eng- 
land nearly all that had been gained during the preceding 
reign ; he was bigoted and intolerant ; his religious policy 
stirred again the old passions of the nation. The people 
were divided more and more into two sharply differ- 
entiated factions: the gay Cavaliers, the remnant of the 
Tudor courtiers, the embodiment of all the luxury and 
display, the brightness and joyousness, the worldliness 
and vice, of the Elizabethan age ; and the grim Puritans, 
the heirs of Langland and of Wyclif, of Tyndale and Lat- 
imer, with their intense hatred of all sensuous beauty and 
mere art and their loud condemnation of the vanity and 
immorality of the age. 

The Puritans from the first had fought against the 
theaters. They were the ** devil's chapels," and stage 
plays were the devil's litanies. Under the intolerant 
hand of James both parties soon went to extremes. The 



The Decline of the Drama 339 

The First Symptoms of Dramatic Decline The Decline Becomes Rapid 

Cavalier stage became more and more corrupt. The 
humors of Ben Jonson, the first conspicuous signs of de- 
cline, were followed more and more by grotesque char- 
acterizations, studies of types built up from without. 
Instead of characters true to the great fundamental prin- 
ciples that underlie all human life, there began to appear 
studies of exceptions, deformities, abnormal types, mon- 
strosities, displayed against an ingenious and sensational 
background. The tendency was increasingly towards 
comedy, towards light, fantastic variety. The strong 
old blank verse of ^larlowe and Shakespeare was weak- 
ened and softened; foulness and immorality were intro- 
duced with ever-increasing frequency. The decline, at 
first gradual, became rapid, until, in the last decade 
before the closing of the theaters, the drama had almost 
hopelessly degenerated. It had not lost all the elements 
of its former glory; it was not until after the Restoration 
that English audiences could dispense with all that was 
spiritual and spontaneous in the drama; but even before 
the Puritan edict had put a mechanical stop to the period, 
it had in reality reached its final stage. 

To explore the vast cemetery of The British Drama- 
tistSj to treat with fullness even the most prominent among 
the enormous number of playwrights who contributed to 
the work of the period, is not our intention. We can 
only select three or four typical figures and from their 
work study the characteristics and the causes of the 
decline. 

7. Beaumont and Fletcher 

Authorities. Darley, The Old Dramatists, new ed., 
1883; The Mermaid Series, 2 vols.; Dyce's edition, 2 
vols. ; Beaumont and Fletcher : Their Finest 5c:^«^j, selected 



340 The Foundations of English Literature 

Beaumont and Fletcher They Learn from both Shakespeare and Jonson 

by Leigh Hunt ; Golden, Brief History of the Eng- 
lish Drama ; Lowell's essay in Old English Dramatists ; 
Gosse, Jacobean Poets ; Macaulay, Francis Beaumont. 

The opening years of the dramatic era were dominated 
by the genius of Shakespeare ; the middle and later years 
were ruled by the art of Beaumont and Fletcher. The 
earliest work of these famous partners began when the 
master dramatist was closing his labors and preparing to 
leave forever the London stage; their later work was 
done for the second generation of play-lovers, and, taken 
as a whole, it is the best possible commentary upon those 
latter days. Shakespeare had sought ever for the deep 
springs that underlie human action ; he had dealt only 
with what is universal and fundamental in human life, 
and he had held his audiences by the sheer truth and 
power of his creations. It was his to command, to com- 
pel his hearers to follow, awed or enraptured, wherever 
he might lead. Ben Jonson was the first dramatist to 
perceive the signs of decay in the national life. He be- 
came a man with a purpose ; his one effort was to reform. 
To him, vice, to be hated, needed but to be seen in its 
true light. He would show in their most revolting as- 
pects all the evils that were threatening the nation's 
higher life, but he exaggerated his creations, he showed 
only the surface, and he failed to hold the audiences that 
had been trained by Shakespeare to feel rather than to 
reason. Beaumont and Fletcher learned from both of 
these masters; they learned from Jonson to present un- 
usual types rather than characters true at every point to 
the fundamentals of human life; they learned from 
Shakespeare to appeal to the feelings rather than the 
reasoning powers. But they went far beyond their mas- 



The Decline of the Drama 341 

Their Phenomenal Popularity Both from Excellent Families 

ters; they won their audiences by a banquet of mere 
sensuous dehght and romantic beauty; with characters 
and scenes that are often not far from sensational. They 
strove only to please; they yielded at every point to the 
demands of the time. They had no theories, no message, 
no lesson ; it was theirs to supply what the people cared 
for, no matter what it might be. The result was a phe- 
nomena] popularity which was not lessened, to say the 
least, by the fact that they were gentlemen by birth and 
accomplished scholars. Their own generation believed 
them to be artists as great as Shakespeare, if not greater. 
On the title-page of Two Noble Kinsmen, first published 
in 1634, the name of Fletcher is placed before that of 
Shakespeare. The two dramatists were favorites with the 
theaters of the Restoration ; indeed during nearly a cen- 
tury they were reverenced as artists of the highest rank. 
Both writers were from excellent families. Fletcher, 
the elder of the two, was born in 1579, the son of Richard 
Fletcher, who afterwards became successively Bishop of 
Bristol, of Worcester, and of London. Of the life of the 
dramatist, however, almost nothing is known. The life 
of Beaumont, who was the son of a prominent Leicester- 
shire family, is almost equally obscure. We know that 
he was educated at Oxford and at the Inner Temple, 
that he was a prominent figure among the wits of the 
Mermaid Inn, and that he joined Fletcher in dramatic 
collaboration some time in 1608. Few details are known 
of this famous partnership. Aubrey relates that the two 
dramatists ** lived together on the Bankside, not far from 
the playhouse, both bachelors, had the same clothes, 
cloak, etc., between them." The period of collaboration 
lasted, probably, not more than three or four years, during 



342 The Foundations of English Literature 



Fletcher's Fluent Ease His Brilliancy and Charming Personality 

which time they produced no less than ten plays. In 
i6ii Beaumont married and retired to country life, and 
five years later he died at the early age of thirty-one. 
Fletcher worked on for nine years more, producing a pro- 
fusion of plays. He was brilliant and versatile ; he turned 
off work almost without effort. The extant dramas in 
which he certainly had a hand number over fifty titles. His 
contemporary, Brome, has remarked upon his fluent ease: 

Of Fletcher and his works I speak. 
His works ! says Momus, nay his plays you 'd say ! 
Thou hast said right, for that to him was play 
"Which was to others' brains a toil. 

His charming personality, his gentleness, his wit, his 

learning, his gentle birth, his brilliancy, made him the 

delight of his age. His love of comradeship was strong; 

after the departure of Beaumont he col- 

BY BEAUMONT laborated freely with Massineer, Shirley 

AND FLETCHER. _, , , / , , , ' ^' 

1608. phiiaster. Rowlcy, and doubtless others. There are 

1609-1610. The Maid's few plays that are known absolutely to 
leJiX^The Knight he his alone, and, on the other hand, 

of the Burning there are few dramas of the era in which 
i6i2*^*cupid's Re- he may not have had a hand. He died 

v^"i^«- . of the plague in 1625, and was buried in 

' Theodore"^ the Church of St. Saviour's, Southwark, 

BY FLETCHER, in a grave that a few years later was 
1610. The Faithful Opened to receive his old friend Mas- 

Shepherdess. 

1612. The Captain. Smger. 

1613. The Honest No literary partnership ever produced 

Man's Fortune. , .- . , , 

1616. Bonduca. work more uniform in texture than that 

1624. The Bloody of Beaumont and Fletcher. It is impos- 

Brother. ,i . i . . 

Many Others. s*t)le to tell With certainty just what 

dramas they produced together, or to de- 



The Decline of the Drama 343 

The Work of Beaumont and Fletcher Its Richness and Gorgeous Coloring 

tect in the collaborated plays what is Beaumont's and 
what Fletcher's. Contemporary criticism maintained 
that " Beaumont," as Lowell expresses it, ** contributed 
the artistic judgment and Fletcher the fine frenzy," that 
Beaumont's part was to prune and subdue the exuber- 
ance and fancy of his more gifted companion. This on 
the whole seems highly reasonable, especially in the light 
shed by Fletcher's later plays, which are certainly more 
rich and gorgeous, more large and free than the earlier 
works, but which lack their sustained strength and artis- 
tic development. The trend of recent criticism seems 
to make more and more of Fletcher, and to cast Beau- 
mont more and more into the background. 

The strength of Beaumont and Fletcher, for it is almost 
impossible to separate them, lay in their spontaneous ease 
and their romantic grace. Dryden declared that they 
** reproduced the easy conversation of gentlefolks more 
ably than Shakespeare." There is a richness of setting, 
a gorgeousness of coloring, about their work that gives it 
an indefinable charm. 

In spite of all their coarseness [declares Lowell] there is a delicacy, a 
sensibility, an air of romance, and above all, a grace, in their best work 
that make them forever attractive to the young, and to all those who have 
learned to grow old amiably. Imagination, as Shakespeare teaches us to 
know it, we can hardly allow them, but they are the absolute lords of some 
of the fairest provinces in the domain of fancy. Their poetry is genuine, 
spontaneous, and at first hand. 

They were strongest in comedy. " Nothing else in 
English," says Gosse, ** is so like Shakespeare as a suc- 
cessful scene from a romantic comedy of Fletcher." 
There is, indeed, much in Fletcher's personality and art 
to remind us of Shakespeare. They seem to have at- 



344 The Foundations of English Literature 

Fletcher and Shakespeare Defects in Fletcher's Work 

tracted each other. As far as we know, none but Mar- 
lowe and Fletcher was ever admitted into the workshop 
of the great master. The young dramatist served with 
him his apprenticeship, and he learned much of the 
secrets of his power, but his desire to please his age was 
fatal to art in its highest sense, and he failed to reach 
the highest place. His defects were not many, but they 
were fatal. He took impossible types or characters; 
light, airy creations, often beautiful and sensuous. He 
worked from without rather than from within. His 
women are always extremes; they go beyond nature in 
goodness and badness, and there is no middle ground. 
His plays, especially those of his later days, reek with 
indecency and filth. 

They exaggerated [says Gosse] all the dangerous elements which he 
[Jonson] had held restrained ; they proceeded, in fact, downwards towards 
the inevitable decadence, gay with all the dolphin colors of approaching 
death. . . . Yet no conception of English poetry is complete without 
reference to these beautiful, sensuous, incoherent plays. The Alexandrine 
genius of Beaumont and Fletcher was steeped through and through in 
beauty ; and so quickly did they follow the fresh morning of Elizabethan 
poetry that their premature sunset was tinged with dewy and " fresh- 
quilted " hues of dawn. In the short span of their labors they seem to 
take hold of the entire field of the drama, from birth to death, and 
Fletcher's quarter of a century helps us to see how rapid and direct was 
the decline. — Modern English Literature. 

2. John Webster (c. 1580-c, 1625) 

Authorities, Webster s Dramatic Works, 4 vols. (Scrib- 
ners) ; Webster and Tourneur (Mermaid Series) ; Golden, 
Brief History of the English Drama ; Lowell's essay in 
Old English Dramatists, and Swinburne's essay in 
Nineteenth Century, June, 1886. 

Of all the Elizabethan dramatists, Fletcher and Web- 



The Decline of the Drama 345 

A Somber Group of Tragedians Tourneur and Ford 

ster alone may be compared with Shakespeare, — the one 
in comedy, the other in tragedy. Webster was the 
strongest of that somber Httle group of playwrights who 
during a vague period in the early years of the new reign 
w^ove tragedies from the darkest and most fearful ma- 
terials in human experience. Of their personalities and 
life histories we know almost nothing. Tourneur, a 
wild genius, ** infected by some rankling plague-spot of 
the soul," is a mere shadow that flits for a moment across 
the period. The two or three tragedies that bear his 
name are intense, lawless creations, abounding in melo- 
drama, yet full of tragic grandeur. And Ford, who 
** delves with style of steel on plates of bronze his monu- 
mental scenes of spiritual anguish," although he came 
from a good family, is scarcely better known. Law was 
his profession; he doubtless had no practical experience 
with the stage ; he wrote for recreation and not for money, 
and he did some things supremely well. In the opinion 
of Lamb he " was of the first order of poets. He sought 
for sublimity not by parcels in metaphors or visible im- 
ages, but directly where she has her full residence in the 
heart of man, in the actions and sufferings of the greatest 
minds." But his lack of humor, his extravagance and 
impurity, were fatal defects. 

Webster also is a mere name. He was *' born free of 
the Merchant-Tailors' Company," he began to write for 
the stage about 1602, he collaborated freely, especially 
with Dekker, he made his will in 1625, — the rest is con- 
jecture. Seven plays with his name upon the title-page 
have come down to us, but of these at least three are 
known to have been largely influenced by other hands. 

To realize the full strength of the dramatist, to feel, in 



34^ The Foundations of English Literature 

John Webster The Power of His Tragedies 

the words of Swinburne, ** the fierce and scornful inten- 
sity, the ardor of passionate and compressed contempt 
which distinguishes the savagely humorous satire of 
Webster," one must confine himself to his two great 
tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. 
These without question are the strongest tragedies in the 
language outside of Shakespeare. They contain charac- 
ters that are like real men and women ; they leave upon 
us the impression that we have seen a vivid section of 
human life and not a movement of artificial figures, — a 
statement that can be made in its fullness of no other 
dramatist of the period save the great master himself. 
We are continually reminded of Shakespeare, — little 
touches, allusions, turns of thought, coincidences, that 
cannot be charged as direct imitation but which are so 
near it as to be suggestive. Often he equals his master 
in his power of compressing a thought into few words. 

Though his fame [says Swinburne] assuredly does not depend upon the 
merit of a casual passage here and there, it would be easy to select from 
any of his representative plays such examples of the highest, the purest, 
the most perfect power, as can be found only in the works of the greatest 
among poets. There is not, as far as my studies have ever extended, a 
third English poet to whom these words might rationally be attributed by 
the conjecture of a competent reader : 

" We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves, 
Nay, cease to die, by dying." 

Webster's greatest power lay in his command of terror. 
In the oft-quoted words of Lamb, 

To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon 
fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to 
drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit : 



The Decline of the Drama 347 

His Command of Terror His Knowledge of Abnormal Life 

this only a Webster can do. Writers of an inferior genius may " upon 
horror's head horrors accumulate," but they cannot do this. 

In Webster's two great tragedies 

there is [says Lowell] almost something like a fascination of crime and 
horror. Our eyes dazzle with them. The imagination that conceived 
them is a ghastly imagination. Hell is naked before it. It is the imagina- 
tion of nightmare, but of no vulgar nightmare. I would rather call it 
fantasy than imagination, for there is something fantastic in its creations 
and the fantastic is dangerously near to the grotesque. 

It was this constant intensity, this striving after effect 
at any cost, that marks Webster as a decadent dramatist. 
He works always with extremes, he keeps his audience 
always at highest tension. His characters are alive ; they 
are the result of careful design, and we may study them 
as we do real men and women : but they are abnormal 
characters. Crime is ever before us; it *' is presented as 
a spectacle and not as a means of looking into our own 
hearts and fathoming our own consciousness." In Web- 
ster we find every sensation that abnormal life can give: 
there are dances of maniacs, death by crafty devices, 
terrific death-scenes, ghastly tortures, ghosts with skulls, 
strangled infants, madness, murder, crime, — always crime, 
in its most ** creepy " and insidious forms. This was a 
decadent note. To dwell upon deformity and upon ex- 
ceptions to the great laws of life and society is not true 
art ; it is but a step from this to vulgar sensationalism. 

Webster had not Shakespeare's constructive power; he 
lacked a practical knowledge of stage-craft. His Appius 
and Virginia is well designed, but the other dramas are 
sketchy, incoherent, even chaotic. It is, as Gosse has 
remarked, as if the dramatist had furnished a series of 



34^ The Foundations of English Literature 

His Lack of Constructive Power Philip Massinger 

powerful scenes for a collaborator to round out and com- 
plete. His dramas do not succeed upon the stage ; they 
are best read in extracts. Had a contemporary selected 
the best passages and scenes of Webster, and had these 
come down to us as the mutilated remains of a great 
dramatist, we doubtless to-day would rank him by the 
side of Shakespeare himself. 

Required Reading. The Duchess of Malfi (Thayer), 
and The White Devily Temple Dramatists or Mermaid 
Series. 

J. Philip Massinger (1^8^-164.0) 

Authorities. Massinger s Dramatic Works, edited by 
Gifford, also by Cunningham, also by Symonds in 
Mermaid Series; Golden, Brief History of the English 
Drama; Stephen, Hours in a Library ; Lowell, Old 
English Dramatists ; and Gosse, Jacobean Poets. 

Massinger," says Gosse, ** is really, though not tech- 
nically and literally, the last of the great men. In him 
we have all the characteristics of the school in their final 
decay, before they dissolved and were dispersed." Born 
just at the opening of the dramatic period, he belongs 
distinctly to the later group of playwrights who worked 
from models rather than from nature. A little of his 
personal history is known. He was born and reared in 
the household of the Duchess of Pembroke, Sidney's 
sister, where his father was a trusted servant ; he was for 
a time at Oxford, but he drifted early to London, where 
he becomes indistinct in the mist that closes about all the 
dramatists of the era. A few hints there are that he lived 
a life of poverty, and that for years he was driven to do 
hack work for the theaters and to collaborate with more 



The Decline of the Drama 349 

His Life Vague and Unknown His Powers of Construction 

successful playwrights. There is evidence that he worked 
much with Dekker, who is so rarely found save in solu- 
tion with others, with Fletcher, Middleton, Rowley, and 
Field. He is known to have produced no less than 
thirty-seven plays, half of which have perished. His best 
dramas are his tragedy, The Duke of Milan^ and his 
comedy, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, which, on ac- 
count of the striking and picturesque character of Sir 
Giles Overreach, still holds the stage. 

Massinger's strength as a dramatist lay in his powers of 
construction, his skill with stage-craft, his subdued and 
pleasing pictures of contemporary life and manners. He 
was almost wholly without spontaneous creative power; 
he had little humor; he never touched the deeper pas- 
sions ; he seldom created characters that are not of the 
stage stagey. 

He never [says Lamb] shakes or disturbs the mind with grief. He is 
read with composure and placid delight. He wrote with that equability of 
all the passions which made his English style the purest and most free 
from violent metaphors and harsh constructions of any of the dramatists 
who were his contemporaries. 

Everywhere in Massinger's work — and the statement is 
equally true of Shirley and of all the later dramatists — 
there are signs of decaying vitality. Sentiment has taken 
the place of passion ; rhetorical finish has supplanted the 
fine frenzy of the early days. There is an increased 
elaboration, a growing tendency toward complexity and 
detail, a striving after the novel and unusual. Pictur- 
esque types and extreme situations, first used by Jonson, 
have taken the place of studies from life and nature. 
The era was fast declining. Fletcher and Webster and 
Tourneur were the blazing and shifting colors of the sun- 



350 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Sunset of the Dramatic Era Summary 

set ; Massinger and Shirley were the fading afterglow 
that quickly died into leaden hues and utter darkness. 

Thus closed the great dramatic era. It stands sharply 
defined and singularly complete. It was a brief period ; 
Shakespeare and Marlowe might have lived to see its en- 
tire extent. It produced all at once a marvelous group 
of artists : all of the real masters of the era received their 
inspiration during a single decade. The decline began 
when the ranks of this earlier school began to thin ; the 
recruits from the second generation of dramatists were all 
inferior men. It was a period of romanticism: it was 
impossible to make headway with classic forms after the 
great dramas of Shakespeare. He was the Jupiter who 
drew all minor bodies into his vast orbit. The ponderous 
Jonson might resist but he could not overcome the noise- 
less force that drew all men to his great contemporary. 
It was, despite its brevity, a well-rounded era, passing 
through every phase of growth and decline. And it 
ended in a decay that was the result of inevitable laws ; 
that arose from the decline in the national life, from the 
subsidence of that joyous and spontaneous spirit that had 
first made the era possible. 

Required Reading. A New Way to Pay Old Debts 
(Bell's English Classics). 



TABLE IX. — THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



I. 

Period of 
Transition. 

1561-1593- 
From Gorboduc 
to the death of 

Marlowe. 



A gradual blending of the 
old native drama with 
the classic comedy and 
tragedy to produce the 
new romantic type. The 
work of Marlowe marks 
transition to the next 
period. 



John Lyly, 1553-1606. 
Robert Greene, 1560-1592. 
George Peele, I550?-I59S? 
Thomas Xash, 1 567-1600? 
Thomas Lodge, 1558 7-1625. 
Christopher Marlowe, 
1564-1593. 



II. 

Period of 
Culmination. 

1593-1616. 

To the death of 

Shakespeare. 



Spontaneous creative 
power. Work done from 
nature and not from 
models. Scenes and 
characters true to the 
great fundamentals of 
human life. Artlessness 
and simplicity. Johson 
marks beginning of de- 
cline. 



W I L L I a m Shakespeare, 

1564-1616. 
Thomas Dekker, c. 1570- 

1637. 
George Chapman, 1559?- 

1634. 
Thomas Heywood, 15S1?- 

1640? 
Johji Marston, 15757-1634. 
Ben Jonson, 1573-1637. 



III. 

Period of De- 
cadence. 
1616-1637. 

To the death of 
Jonson. 



Art learned by careful 
study of models. In- 
creasing elaboration of 
plot ; characters pic- 
turesque types, marked 
exceptions ; scenes un- 
usual, sensational, ex- 
treme ; a constant striv- 
ing after novelty and 
all that is unusual ; dic- 
tion rhetorical and fin- 
ished, rather than spon- 
taneous. 



Francis Beaumont, 1584- 

1616. 
John Fletcher, 1579-1625. 
John Webster, 1580 7-1625 7 

Cyril Tourneur. ? 7 

Jo Jm Ford, 15 86-1640 7 
Thomas Aliddleton, 1570- 

1627. 
Philip Mas singer, 1 583-1640. 
James Shirley, 1 596-1666. 



IV. 

Period of 
Quick Decline. 

1637-1642. 

To the closing of 

the theaters. 



Increasing sensationalism; 
striving after effects ; 
immoral scenes and sug- 
gestions. Not until af- 
ter the Restoration did 
the drama reach its low- 
est level of degradation. 



John Crowne, 7 ? 

Sir William Davenant, 1606- 

i663. 

Richard Brome, ? ? 

Sir John Suckling, 1609- 

1641. 



351 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE TRIUMPH OF PROSE 

THE homely, yet strong and picturesque, writings of 
men like Tyndale and Latimer are in the history 
of English prose what the creations of Langland and the 
ballad-makers are in English poetry. They were vigor- 
ous, unschooled, spontaneous outpourings. The Renais- 
sance touched this native prose, but it did not greatly 
change its form or its spirit. Sir John Cheke, the master 
mind of the Cambridge scholars, maintained that ** our 
tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and 
unmingled with borrowings of other tongues," and his 
influence and that of his followers kept the old vernacu- 
lar prose in something like its native simplicity. But 
classic influence was inevitable. Later scholars like 
Ascham were influenced all unconsciously by their knowl- 
edge of Greek and Latin; their work was often per- 
meated by the classic spirit ; it followed often in curious 
windings the classic order, and there are traces even of 
classic idioms. English prose very gradually was begin- 
ning to assume two forms, the scholarly and the popular, 
yet it is needless to attempt to draw the line between 
them. The scholarly writers made no attempt to evolve 
a new prose style ; their imitation of the classics had been 
all unconscious; it had come spontaneously and was as 
free from artificiality and from deliberate self-criticism as 
were even Latimer's unclassic sermons. All prose before 
Lyly, and indeed much that came after his time, belongs 

352 



The Triumph of Prose 353 



Three Periods of English Prose The Need of a Great Prose Master 

to the first period, the period of writers who were entirely 
occupied with their message and who gave not a thought 
to the manner of presenting it. The 
prose of this earliest period has already 1552. The Book of 
been considered. It is singularly rich common Prayer. 

. i> y J558. Knox's First 

and volummous, and it contams some of Blast of the xrum- 
the strongest and most idiomatic crea- f^^v . ^ , , 

=" 1363. Foxe's Book of 

tions in the language. Martyrs. 

With Lyly begins the second period '^IJ: Hounshed's 

J y i=> IT Chronicle. 

of English prose, the period of experi- 1579- North's piu- 
ment, of uncertainty, of transition. All ,581.'' Sidney's Apoi- 
in a moment, with a single book, English ogyforPoesy. 

I J r .1 , r • 1582. Hakluyt's Di- 

prose leaped from the extreme of sim- vers voyages. 

plicity to the extreme of elaboration. 1589. Puttenham'sArt 

Euphues was a mere vagary, but it marks i^gi. Raleigh's Fight 

the opening of an epoch. The vogue of about the Azores. 

Euphuism was short, but not so the 

vogue of prose that depended upon some peculiarity of 

style. For a decade style was everything; readers read 

books not for what was said but for how it was said. A 

time of reaction was inevitable; sooner or later a master 

must appear to gather up the strongest elements of both 

schools and unite them in a new and superior type of 

prose. 

This master proved to be Richard Hooker. With no 

thought of producing a new literary form, with no thought 

of anything save the message that burned within him, he 

produced a prose that was as impassioned and spontaneous 

as Latimer's and as finished and artificial as Lyly's. He 

stands as a transition figure; he by no means spoke the 

final word concerning English prose ; it remained for later 

masters to form the perfect blend between the styles of 
23 



354 The Foundations of English Literature 

Richard Hooker His Eventless Life 

Latimer and Lyly, yet it was Hooker who first discovered 
the secret of strong and artistic prose, a Hterary form that 
was to dominate the next era in English literature. 

I. Richard Hooker (i^^j-i6oo) 

Authorities. Walton's charming work, though written 
in 1665, is still the standard biography of Hooker (Temple 
Classics). Keble's Hooker s Complete Works was long the 
standard edition, but it is now superseded by Church's 
edition. See also Church, Ecclesiastical Polity, Book i. 
(Clarendon Press), and Whipple's essay in Literature of 
the Age of Elizabeth. 

The life of Hooker leads us away from the glitter and 
excitement of the court and theater, where almost all the 
literature of the period is to be found, into the quiet 
seclusion of the scholastic hall and the country parsonage. 
Compared with the wild careers of the University Wits, 
and of many of the poets and dramatists, his life was well- 
nigh colorless. The son of poor parents, ** better quali- 
fied to rejoice in his early piety than to appreciate his 
early intelligence," he had the great good fortune of fall- 
ing into the hands of an appreciative schoolmaster, who, 
after teaching him what he was able, succeeded in impart- 
ing his enthusiasm in the lad to Bishop Jewell. The 
young genius was thereupon rescued from the trade ap- 
prenticeship to which his parents would have bound him, 
and sent at the early age of fourteen to Oxford, where as 
student, fellow, and lecturer he passed the next fifteen 
years. His after-life was eventless. He was for seven 
years Master of the Temple, but he preferred the retire- 
ment of country parishes, and his last days were spent in 
comparative seclusion. He was first of all a student. 



The Triumph of Prose 355 

A Lover of Studious Seclusion The Ecclesiastical Polity 

Slight and feeble of body, retiring and sensitive in dis- 
position, he was ill-equipped for the rough hand-to-hand 
contest with the world. It was only when in his study, 
pen in hand, surrounded by his books, that he was per- 
fectly in his element. It was from this secluded nook, 
himself unseen, that he sent forth his Laws of Ecclesiasti- 
cal Polity, a work to which he gave his entire life, and a 
work which even now ranks as the best exposition and 
defense of the English Church. 

The subject-matter of the Ecclesiastical Polity need not 
long detain us. The work grew from the fierce religious 
controversy that raged with ever-increasing violence 
during the whole period. It was an age, as Hooker de- 
clared, " full of tongue and weak of brain." Theologi- 
cal discussion that was wild and windy filled the period 
full of pamphlets and sermons. The Church of England 
stood in the thick of the battle ; it was regarded by many 
as almost an accident, an unconsidered creation called 
into being by the whim of Henry VIII. It was bitterly 
assailed by Catholic, Puritan, and Calvinist. Hooker at- 
tempted to defend it, to justify its laws, to prove it the 
best possible compromise between widely differing ele- 
ments. But in attempting to do this he did far more. 
As Crofts has so well expressed it : 

Hooker's work is not only important in the history of the English Church 
and as marking an epoch in the Puritan controversy ; it is important in the 
highest degree in the history of English thought. Hooker did in the sphere 
of moral and social knowledge what Bacon did in the sphere of natural sci- 
ence. Bacon gave to the students and observers of nature the idea of law, 
— of law which was not the creation of the intellectual imagination, but 
whose actual existence was to be discovered by the careful and patient 
examination of phenomena. Bacon was the first in the modern world to 
establish scientifically the idea that there was an invariable sequence in the 



356 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Impassioned and Finished Style His Elaborate and Sonorous Diction 

phenomena of nature ; that there was order in the world of nature. 
Hooker's work first suggested that there was order in the moral world ; that 
man has neither absolute power over his life nor is the servant of an om- 
nipotent and capricious will ; but is always unconsciously governed by law. 
" He laid down," says Mr. Church, " the theory of a rule derived not from 
one alone, but from all sources of light and truth with which man finds 
himself encompassed." In his work lay the germs of what has since devel- 
oped into moral and political science. — English Literature. 

The style of Hooker is at once impassioned and finished. 
** Matter and manner are wedded as in few other books 
of the same kind," and indeed as in no other books be- 
fore the age of Dryden. He does not depend upon oc- 
casional flashes of eloquence ; he is singularly sustained 
and constant. His round, full periods follow each other 
like the vast unbreaking waves in mid-ocean. He draws 
upon the full resources of the language, and sometimes 
he goes beyond it. Like More and Ascham, he follows 
often the Latin order and presses into service Latinized 
terms and expressions. At times his elaborate and sono- 
rous diction overleaps itself and becomes dangerously near 
to mere fustian, but this by no means condemns the 
author. The partition between sublimity and bombast, 
as we learned from Marlowe, is indeed a thin one. He 
was an innovator; he worked without models; and the 
wonder is that he accomplished results of such uniform 
excellence and power. Hallam's criticism, while to 
some it may seem extreme, has been generally indorsed : 

So stately and graceful is the march of his periods, so various the fall of 
his musical cadences upon the ear, so rich in images, so condensed in sen- 
tences, so grave and noble his diction, so little is there of vulgarity in his 
racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrases, that I know not whether 
any later writer has more admirably displayed the capacities of our Ian- 



The Triumph of Prose 357 

Francis Bacon " The Influx of Decomposition and Prose " 

guage, or produced passages more worthy of comparison with the splendid 
monuments of antiquity. 

Required Reading. Ecclesiastical Polity, Book i. 
(Clarendon Press). 

2. Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans (1^61-1626) 

Authorities. Spedding, Francis Bacon and His Times, 
a scholarly and authoritative work, presents Bacon in the 
best possible light; Macaulay's Essay is brilliant and 
merciless; Church's Life, in English Men of Letters 
Series, is conservative and accurate, — the best short 
study of Bacon. Among the great mass of other authori- 
ties the most helpful are Abbot, Life and Work of Bacon ; 
Nichol, Francis Bacon, His Life and Philosophy ; Rey- 
nold, Bacons Essays ; Arber, A Harmony of the Essays, 
and Ellis, Bacons Complete Works, Riverside Edition. 
For bibliography of authorities, see Welsh, English 
Masterpiece Course, and Clark, English Prose Writers. 

When we reach Francis Bacon we catch our first glimpse 
of the modern world. The Elizabethans with their fine 
frenzy, their gorgeous dreams, their delight in the present 
hour, were creatures of the Renaissance. They were in- 
toxicated with the promise and the joy of life, its sensu- 
ous delights, its awful mysteries, its swift movement, its 
wild uncertainty. They wrote for the present moment, 
intensely, artlessly; and never dreamed of literary laws, 
of criticism, of analysis, of posterity. Into this care- 
less, inspired Renaissance age Francis Bacon came as a 
breath from a new world. He brought with him the idea 
of science in its modern sense, an idea which is the very 
opposite of poetry and romance. With him began, in 
Emerson's phrase, ** the influx of decomposition and 
prose." With him began the modern age of analysis, 



358 The Foundations of English Literature 

He Opens the Modern Age of Analysis His Early Training 

of cause and effect, of criticism, — of science. The great 
creative age had reached its full ; poetry in its primitive, 
spontaneous, youthful beauty must henceforth fade 
more and more, for, says Emerson again, " Whoever dis- 
credits analogy and requires heaps of facts before any 
theories can be attempted has no poetic power, and 
nothing original or beautiful will be produced by him." 

But despite the work that separates him from his con- 
temporaries Bacon was still peculiarly a child of his age. 
He touched it at a thousand points. His father was for 
twenty years Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of Elizabeth, 
and the childhood and youth of Bacon were passed in the 
very heart of the royal court. He was reared among 
courtiers and favorites in an atmosphere heavy with ful- 
some flattery, with intrigue and corruption. His moral 
sense became blunted, while his naturally powerful intel- 
lect became sharpened and strengthened. He went to 
Cambridge, where he soon detected the weakness of the 
prevailing educational methods ; he went to Paris, where 
he studied a new phase of worldliness ; he returned to 
England and plunged into a study of the law as the 
surest profession for winning political preferment, which 
in his mind was the only desirable means of worldly 
advancement. 

Bacon's Political Career y its struggles and its triumphs, 
its weakness and its mistakes, we need not follow. It is 
a sad story and it points an obvious moral. The man 
was a strange mixture of things good and evil, one wholly 
impossible in any other age and environment than that 
in which he flourished. He had the daring, the power, 
the lofty idealism of the Elizabethans, but to it was 
joined the fawning meanness, the venality, the petty 



The Triumph of Prose 359 

The Two Natures within Him His Philosophy 

place-seeking ideals of the Jacobean court. He seems 
like two men in one ; he lived two lives separated from 
one another by a whole world. In one he rises into the 
clouds; he would bring to the world for all time a new 
method of arriving at truth. He writes like a pure- 
hearted, broad-souled man ; his essays contain all of the 
rudiments of practical ethics: and yet, because he feared 
to lose favor with the sovereign, he who could write so 
sweetly of Friendship, hastened his dearest friend to 
death ; and he who wrote, as if inspired, counsels to those in 
great place, condemning with eloquence bribery and cor- 
ruption, confessed in abject and fawning humility that he 
himself as Lord Chancellor had received countless bribes 
without a thought of protest. The man who could rise 
to the heights of the Novum Organum could also bathe 
in the mire of the most corrupt of all royal courts. 

His Philosophy. It was the dream of Bacon's life from 
the days of his early manhood to establish himself with 
posterity as a philosopher and a benefactor of the human 
race. He was the first of Elizabethans, perhaps the first 
of Englishmen, to look away from his own day to an im- 
mortality in the generations unborn. His one thought 
was for permanency. He would be *' a cosmopolitan 
philosopher writing for all ages and all nations," and he 
would also win the best prizes of his own day. He would 
" take all knowledge for his province," and he would also 
be Lord Chancellor of England. He believed that he had 
discovered a new instrument, a " novum organum," by 
the use of which vast unexplored areas of truth would be 
opened up. His Novum Organum was to be a thesaurus 
of things which, in his own words, had " never yet en- 
tered the thoughts of any mortal man " ; it was to revo- 



360 The Foundations of English Literature 

Bacon and the Scholastic System He Originates but Does Not Execute 

lutionize the whole realm of thought. Such were his 
dreams, wild enough in the Elizabethan times, but com- 
monplace enough to-day. For this ** novum organum " 
was the inductive method which is the very foundation 
of modern science. 

Before Bacon's day all knowledge had been based upon 
authority. The investigator after truth must delve in 
the learned dust of the libraries; he must consult the 
schoolmen from Aristotle down. The scholastic system 
had been modified since the days of Duns Scotus, but it 
still ruled the universities. Bacon insisted that nature 
is the supreme authority; that she ** is commanded by 
obeying her," that " the mind must follow nature, not 
anticipate her; it must be passive and receptive rather 
than active and speculative." The investigator after 
truth must gather facts in abundance; he must note ex- 
ceptions and variations ; he must tabulate and retabulate 
his results, and by a series of exclusions and coincidences 
arrive at the ultimate law. But Bacon, after explaining 
the workings of his new instrument, left others to test 
and perfect it. He made few experiments; he arrived at 
few conclusions. 

The great and wonderful work which the world owes to him [says 
Church] was in the idea and not in the execution. The idea was that the 
systematic and wide examination of facts was the first thing to be done in 
science, and until this had been done faithfully and impartially, with all 
the appliances and all the safeguards that experience and forethought 
could suggest, all generalizations, all anticipations from mere reasoning, 
must be adjourned and postponed ; and further, that, sought on these con- 
ditions, knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men then im- 
agined, could be attained. His was the faith of the discoverer, the 
imagination of the poet, the voice of the prophet. But his was not the 
warrior's arm, the engineer's skill, the architect's creativeness. " I only 
sound the clarion," he says, " but I enter not into the battle." 



The Triumph of Prose 361 

The Rise of Modern Science Bacon Suspicious of the English Tongue 

But there were plenty of men who would enter the 
battle. Modern science was awakening all about him. 
Honest, unprejudiced investigators, who could grapple 
closely with the phenomena of nature, ^.^^^^^ 1539-1583. 
were for the first time in human history Tycho Brahe, 1546- 
beginning to appear. The age of geo- '^"^'apier, 1550-1617. 
graphical discovery was to be succeeded Gaiiieo, 1564-1642. 

L ^1 r • x-i2 J- -ru Kepler, 1571-1613. 

by the age of scientific discovery. Ihe Harvey, 1578-1657. 
realm of nature was beginning to be seen Boyie, 1625-1691. 

r I r • - ■ 1-1 1 • Huygens, 1629-1695. 

for the first time m its true light, and it Locke, 1632-1704. 
was Bacon who furnished the instrument Newton, 1642-1727. 
that made all clear. " He moved," says Macaulay, 
" the intellects which have moved the world." 

The Writings of Bacoft. The controlling motive of 
Bacon's life was to develop and explain his philosophy. 
The greater part of his writings are, therefore, philosophi- 
cal and technical rather than literary. ^Moreover, in his 
zeal to work for all ages and all people he used the Latin 
tongue, " the universal language," which in his estima- 
tion was to *' last as long as bookes last." He looked 
with distrust upon the strong old English tongue. 
" These modern languages," he declared, " will at one 
time or another play the bank-rowte with books." He 
would take no risk with his precious message to poster- 
ity, and he was uneasy until all of his books, even his 
Essays, had been turned into the trusty Latin. As a re- 
sult his purely literary accomplishment in his native 
tongue was not large; yet, small as it is, it is of enormous 
value. For the prose of Bacon in its extreme conciseness 
and vigor, its clearness and proportion, its eloquence and 
rich imagery, is unsurpassed by any other English prose 
of his age. Bacon wrote with extreme care ; he hoarded 



362 The Foundations of English Literature 

His Writings His New Atlantis the Jacobean Utopia 

his thoughts and poHshed them again and again. His 
notebooks which still exist bear testimony to his habit 
of economy of ideas and words. He toiled over his page 
like a Macaulay. ** After my manner," he declares, " I 
alter ever when I add. So that nothing is finished till 
all be finished." His Essays, the first ten of which ap- 
peared in 1597, is beyond doubt his best known and most 
deserving book. It is " a work," says Green, " remark- 
able not merely for the condensation of its thought and 
Essays, 1597, 1612,1625. its fcHcity and exactness of expression, 

^le^Tning!^i6oV ^^ ^"^ ^^^ ^^^ P°^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^ applied 

History of Henry to human life that experimental analysis 
The New Atlantis, which Bacon was at a later time to make 
^^27. the key to Science." The same accuracy 

and compression of thought, the same breadth of view 
and fullness of experience, appear in The Advancement of 
Learning, which is a general introduction to his great 
philosophic work ; in his Henry VII. , which was the first 
philosophic history ever written in English, and his New 
Atlantis, which was the Jacobean Utopia. A comparison 
of the dream of More with that of Bacon is extremely 
suggestive. More would renovate England, he would 
make an ideal island from existing elements; Bacon 
would commence anew and build a government founded 
upon his Novum Organum. The New Atlantis is the 
nineteenth century as Bacon dreamed of it. The differ- 
ence between the Renaissance and the modern scientific 
spirit cannot be better illustrated than by a comparison 
of these old dreams. 

Bacons Essays. It would doubtless amaze Bacon, were 
he to visit the present century, to find the verdict which 
time has rendered upon his writings. His ponderous 



The Triumph of Prose 363 

Bacon's Essays Their Incisive, Practical Style 

Novum OrganuMy which was too precious to trust to the 
EngHsh language, is often mentioned by students, but 
not a dozen men now Hving have ever read it ; the dust 
of centuries has gathered upon the few editions that the 
years have demanded, but the essays, the homely, un- 
bookish diversions of its author's idle moments, have 
gained in popularity and influence with every year. 

The word '* essay " was borrowed from Montaigne. It 
meant in Bacon's mind a first attempt, a preliminary 
study, a rough jotting down of notes, or, as he himself 
phrases it, of ** dispersed meditations." The first ten 
essays of 1597 were indeed but jottings from a notebook, 
but as the author proceeded he gained more and more in 
form and arrangement until at length he had evolved the 
essay in the modern sense of the term, — the short, con- 
cise, perfectly rounded study of some single phase of 
human thought or human interest. In Bacon's mind the 
essay must come near to the homely, familiar things of 
common life; it must " come home to men's businesses 
and bosoms." 

Descending from his " specular mount" [says Storr] the philosopher of 
the Novum Organum strolls with us to the market-place, conducts us 
over his great house and stately gardens, lets us peep into his study, and 
points out his favorite authors, entertains us with reminiscences of court 
and council chambers, and unfolds the secrets of statecraft and the wind- 
ings and doubles of diplomatists and placemen ; he gives us hints on 
travel, hints on bargaining, hints on physicking ourselves ; he advises us 
(though his advice on those deeper matters is superficial and commonplace) 
about marriage and education of children, the religious conduct of life, and 
the fear of facing death. Yet it may be noted in passing that, in spite of 
the familiarity of manner and the practical common-sense of the essays, 
their range in one direction is very limited, and they deal only with a 
small fraction of hurhanity. Throughout, life is regarded from the stand- 
ing point of the author — of the courtier, the high official, the man of 



364 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Dawn of Self-Criticism Bacon a True Elizabethan 

wealth and position — and the conduct and feelings of the masses are con- 
sidered only as they affect him. 

The style of Bacon differs widely from that of Hooker. 
The long majestic periods of the Ecclesiastical Polity are 
the work of a man who is carried to the height of elo- 
quence by the very force of his passion. Bacon worked 
deliberately; he saw clearly and deeply and he would 
have his reader see clearly also. A constant seeking for 
effectiveness led to a constant self-criticism which is at 
the very basis of style in the modern sense. Without 
striving for style he became unconsciously a stylist. As 
we read him we feel at once that we are in contact with 
an intellect of marvelous keenness and power; with one 
who had a message, but who sought by every possible 
means to make that message most effective. He pre- 
served the pungent, native flavor of the old English 
prose, but he united to it the careful art of Lyly and the 
broad facility of the classic writers. 

Such, then, was Francis Bacon, a vast and half-uncer- 
tain figure standing on the border between the ancient 
and the modern worlds. He was a true Elizabethan. 
He had all the daring and idealism and splendid creative 
ability of his most marvelous generation. He who at 
thirty-one could announce that he had taken all knowl- 
edge for his province was a true son of the ** spacious 
age," the age that could inspire Spenser to begin the 
mighty task of The Faerie Queene, and that could lead 
Milton to essay ** things unattempted yet in prose or 
rhyme." But Bacon was the first of the Elizabethans to 
turn to the material world. Spenser had been kindled by 
the heroic past to sing of an ideal society where chival- 
rous morality should rule ; Shakespeare had shed the fierce 



The Triumph of Prose 365 

A Prophet and Seer The King James Version 

light of his genius upon the workings of the human heart 
in an immortal present ; Milton was to cast his eyes into 
the world beyond this life. All of them dealt with the 
immaterial side of the universe; Bacon turned the Eliza- 
bethan inspiration upon the physical and the material. 
He had caught a single glimpse of the centuries to come, 
and he told the secret that was to make possible modern 
science. Yet Bacon is by no means to be reckoned 
among the moderns; he was by no means a scientist; he 
could not, like a Newton or a Darwin, grapple closely 
with the phenomena of nature. He was an Elizabethan, 
inspired and artless; a prophet and a seer; a pure idealist 
as much as was Shakespeare or Milton. He was, as he 
has declared himself, the bell that called others into the 
sanctuary but he himself entered not. 

Required Reading. Bacons Essays. The most satis- 
factory and accessible edition of The Advancement of 
Learning is Cook's, and of Henry VIII. is Lumby's (Pitt 
Press Series). 

J. The King James Version. 

Authorities. Scrivener, The Authorized Edition of the 
English Bible, 161 1 ; Eadie, The English Bible ; Moul- 
ton, The History of the English Bible ; Westcott, A 
General View of the History of the English Bible ; Cook, 
The Bible and English Prose Style. 

The crowning work of the Elizabethan period was un- 
questionably the King James Version of the Scriptures. 
Its appearance marks the end of the age of foundations 
and the beginning of the modern era. Before it there 
had been no generally accepted standard of measure for 
diction and style ) the language had become strong and 



366 The Foundations of English Literature 



A Century of Earnest Workers Various Translations of the Bible 

rich and wonderfully flexible, but it was yet as wax in 
the hands of every original writer. It needed to be em- 
bodied in some supreme, universally accepted masterpiece 
before it could become fixed and inviolable. Shakespeare 
had done this in a degree, but his dramas, popular as 
they were with contemporary playgoers, were for a cen- 
tury almost unread. It was the English Bible, read by all 
classes and by every fireside, that gave the final form both 
to the English language and to English literature. 

The formation of this supreme masterpiece was not the 
work of any one man or of any one body of men ; it was 
the result of a century of earnest laborers. The era of 
Bible translation began in reality with Tyndale. From 
the days when his strong and marvelously simple versions 
of the Gospels began to circulate in England down to the 
days of King James hardly a decade went by without its 
translation of the Scriptures. It was during this century 
that England became, in the words of Green, ** the 
people of a book." Every version had its own peculiari- 
ties and merits, and every one was to 

1380. Wyclifs Ver- ' -^ . 

sion. some degree an advance upon its prede- 

1388. Purvey's Re- cggsors, but all vcrsions were true in the 

vision. 

1525-1536. Tyndaie's main to the great model first struck out 
isro!" ^ndl^eTpen. ^y Tyndale. "He it was," says Dr. 

tateuch. Eadie, ** who gave us the first great out- 

'^Blbie.°''^'"'*^^^'' lin^' distinctly and wonderfully etched." 
1537. Matthew's Working wholly ' ' without forensample, 
isfg.^^^Taverner's ^^ ^^ expressed it, for he did not consult 

Bible. Wyclifs translation, Tyndale made a 

1539. The Great Bible. , ,, ... . 1 1.1. j • ^l. 

1557. whittingham's wholly ongmal version, clothed in the 
New Testament. strong, homcly idioms of the common 

1560. TheGeneva , . i'i-. .1 rr- 

Bible. people, — a version which is to the King 



The Triumph of Prose 367 



Request for a New Version Rules Laid Down by the King 

James Bible what the Anglo-Saxon 1568. The Bishops- 
tongue is to modern English. The ^^f^^^he Rheims 
whole century of translation was only a New Testament. 

1 , • 1 • r, • 11 1609-1610. The Douay 

gradual enrichmg, a softenmg and har- oid Testament, 
monizing, of this first great outline. ^^n. The King james 

To follow the gradual evolution of theigsi-isss." The Re. 
English Bible from Tyndale's first sketch ^^^^^^ version. 
is a fascinating study. No field of liter- 
ary history is more full of stirring incident, of noble self- 
sacrifice, of heroic devotion to lofty ideals, and of grander 
results, but it does not fall within the limits of our plan. 
During the era of Elizabeth the two versions commonly 
in use in England were the Bishops' Bible and the Geneva 
Bible, the one supported by Church and Parliament and 
the other used widely by the common people, especially 
the Puritans. Under such conditions jealousy and dis- 
content were natural and inevitable. Both churchmen 
and Puritans were anxious for a change, and accordingly 
at the great conference called by the King at the open- 
ing of his reign to hear and determine ** things pretended 
to be amiss in the Church," it is not strange that a request 
should have been made for an authorized and standard 
version of the Scriptures. The request found favor with 
James, who had ideas of his own upon theological mat- 
ters, and he at once chose fifty-four of his leading scholars 
and divines to prepare the new version. 

Every means possible was taken to secure a perfect 
translation. By the rules laid down by the King, the 
translators were to be divided into companies, and it was 
required of ** every particular man of each company to 
take the same chapter or chapters, and having translated 
or emended them severally by himself, where he thinks 



368 The Foundations of English Literature 

A Revision Rather than a Translation Made at the Right Moment 

good, all to meet together to confer what they have done 
and agree for their part what shall stand." The work 
thereupon was to be sent to all of the other companies, 
who were to examine it ** seriously and judiciously, 
for his Majesty is very careful on this point." They 
were to follow the Bishops' Bible, which was to be '* as 
little altered as the original will permit," but the King 
added as his last rule: ** These translations to be used 
when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bi- 
ble — Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Matthew's, Whitchurch's, 
Geneva." 

The King James Version was, therefore, a revision 
rather than a translation. It was the result of a careful 
collation of all previous translations compared with the 
originals, and as a result it contains the strongest ele- 
ments of all previous versions. It is singularly free from 
the personality of its translators. Working as they did 
in companies and allowing no word or phrase to pass 
until by general consent it had been declared the best 
possible rendering, and drawing constantly, as they were 
required to do, the best words and phrases from previous 
translations, it is not strange that their work should have 
had a strength, a smoothness, a consistency, and an ab- 
sence of all marks of personal peculiarity that no single 
translator could ever have reached. The work was done 
at precisely the right time. The Elizabethan period was 
at its height; the air was electric with creative energy; 
all the elements of style and diction had been evolved ; 
the language had become rich and full and wholly ade- 
quate, — everything was ready. A half-century later the 
task would have been impossible; the ** age of prose and 
reason " would have produced a literary Bible which 



The Triumph of Prose 369 

Strength and Beauty of the Version Its Influence on Later Writers 

would have been a failure. The rules of James which 
held the translators rigidly to the old Saxon outline made 
the version a popular book, and the scholarly and literary 
atmosphere through which it passed in translation made 
it acceptable to scholars and churchmen. It was the final 
triumph of the old native tongue. The school of Lang- 
land and Tyndale and Latimer was henceforth to rule 
English literature. 

The strength and beauty of the King James Version 
have been recognized by every English master for three 
centuries. It is ** the greatest prose triumph of the 
time," says Brooke; it is ** probably the greatest prose 
work in any language," declares Saintsbury. Its influ- 
ence is traceable in every masterpiece in later English 
literature. The makers of the Revised Version testify 
to its beauty and power: *' We have had to study this 
great Version carefully and minutely, line by line ; and 
the longer we have been engaged upon it the more we 
have learned to admire its simplicity, its dignity, its 
power, its happy turns of expression, its general ac- 
curacy, and, we must not fail to add, the music of its 
cadences, and the felicity of its rhythm." 

Nor has its influence been confined to literary fields. 
From the study of its pages there came to Englishmen 
a new conception of human life and of individual liberty, 
and a new outlook upon religious and social problems. 
The Puritan Revolution had its roots in this one book, 
and the whole spirit of the succeeding age which made 
England what she now is came largely from its pages. It 
stimulated mental activity; it awoke the lower classes, 
upon whom there still hung the drowsiness of the Middle 
Ages. ** Legend and annal," says Green, " war-song 



370 The Foundations of English Literature 

" The National Epic of Britain " Close of the Period of Foundations 

and psalm, State-roll and biography, the mighty voices 
of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of mis- 
sion journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen, 
philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung 
broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part by 
any rival learning." It educated England as no other 
country has ever been educated, and its influence has in- 
creased with every year. 

Consider [says Huxley], that for three centuries this book has been 
woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history ; that 
it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and 
simple from John-o'-Groat's house to Land's End as Dante and Tasso once 
were to the Italians ; that it is written in the noblest and purest English and 
abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form ; and, finally, that it 
forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the 
existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past 
stretching back to the farthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. 

With the Bible in its final form the period of founda- 
tions may be said to have closed in England. Henceforth 
there was to be the rearing of a noble superstructure, but 
it was to be upon a broad and unchangeable base. 

Required Reading. No one can attain to a strong and 
idiomatic prose style or be able to appreciate fully the 
masterpieces of English literature without a constant 
study of the English Bible. 



TABLE X.— THE 


ELIZABETHAN 


AGE, 1557-1625 


English Literature, 


English History 


Foreign Literature and 
Events. 


I.— Poetry. 


1585. Raleigh's 


1544-1595. Tasso. 


Sir Philip Sidney, 1554- 


Virginia Colony. 


1 564-1642. Galileo. 


1586. 


1587. Execution 


1572. St, Bartholomew. 


Edmund Spenser, 1552- 


of Mary. 


1580, Montaigne's -£■ J- j-^jj/J. 


1599. 


1588. The Spanish 


1584, Death of William 


The Sonneteers, 1592- 


Armada. 


of Orange, 


1596. 


1595. Tyrone's Re- 


1596-1650, Descartes, 


Samuel Daniel, 1562- 


bellion. 


French Philosopher. 


1619, 


1603, Accession of 


1598. Edict of Nantes. 


Michael Drayton, 1563- 


James I. 


1600-1681. C alder on, 


1631. 


1604. Hampton 


Spanish Dramatist. 


John Donne, 1573-1621. 


Court Confer- 


1605. Cervantes' Don 




ence. 


Quixote. 


II.— The Elizabethan 


1605. Gunpowder 


1606 -1684. Corneille, 


Novel. 


Plot. 


French Dramatist. 


John Lyly, 1553-1606. 


1607. Virginia 


1618. Thirty Years' War 


Robert Greene, 1560- 


Settled. 


Opens. 


1592. 


1620. The Puritans 


1621-1695. La Fontaine, 


Sir Philip Sidney, 1554- 


Settle New Eng- 


French Fabulist. 


1586. 


land, 


1622 -1673, Moliere, 


Thomas Nash, 1 567-1600. 


1621. Impeachment 


French Dramatist, 


III. — Later Prose. 


of Bacon. 


1623-1662. Pascal, 




1625. Charles I. 


French Philosopher. 


Richard Hooker, 1553- 






1600. 






Francis Bacon, 1 561-1626. 






King James Bible, 1611. 






IV.— The Drama. 






See Table IX. 







37X 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE AGE OF MILTON 
I 62 5- I 660 

IN just what year or what decade the great creative 
period came to an end it is impossible to say. It 
certainly did not close with the reign of Elizabeth. The 
Queen undoubtedly heard its most rapturous and inspired 
notes, but many of its greatest productions came forth 
during the reign of her successor, and its echoes died- not 
wholly away until the days of the Commonwealth. But 
while it is impossible to fix precise limits, just as it is im- 
possible to tell the day or the week when spring closes 
and summer begins, it is nevertheless certain that some 
time during the last years of King James and the early 
years of Charles I. the period came to an 

THE STUARTS. ^ , rj., . . , ^ , 

James I., 1603-1625. ^^^' ^hc mspircd group of poets and 
Charles I., 1625-1649. dramatists and prose writers who began 
The Commonwealth, their work during the last decade of 
Charles II., 1660-1685. Elizabeth left behind them no successors, 
wuuam 'and^Mary, As onc by One thcsc truc Elizabethans 
1688-1702. ceased to sing, the chorus died away. 

Anne, 1702-1714. <-,• ^i_ • 1 1 

Singers there were m abundance, writers 
and poets in every style and key, but they had lost the 
rapture, the inspiration, and the daring of the earlier 
creators. 

It had been a marvelous epoch. When it opened, the 
native books of England might have been gathered upon 

372 



The Age of Milton 373 

The Elizabethan Period English Phase of Italian Renaissance 

a single shelf. Imitation and experiment had set its 
stamp upon every volume; not one could have been 
chosen as a safe model for future writers. But in a scant 
half-century all was changed. England now had a native 
literature which in volume and strength and originality 
was not inferior to the best literatures of the world. It 
had produced works which have served even to our own 
day as the supreme models for literary production; it 
had laid completely the foundations upon which all later 
English writers have built and upon which all future 
writers must continue to build. All the centuries from 
Caedmon to Chaucer and Spenser had been but a gradual 
preparation for this epoch. 

It was a brief period. It had originated in the enthu- 
siasm and patriotism and hope of a great people united in 
a moment of crisis about an idealized leader. It had 
been the English phase of the Italian Renaissance. The 
leaders of the nation's thought had awakened for a mo- 
ment to the meaning of a larger life ; they had caught a 
glimpse of a new world, and it thrilled them and inspired 
them. But the direction of this English Renaissance 
had been sensuous and uncontrolled. Mere beauty, the 
ecstasy of the present hour, the artless voicing of the 
moment's joy or woe, this became the literature of 
the time. It was an era of intensity and passion, an 
era that cared nothing for posterity, and by its very care- 
lessness made itself immortal. The movement had been 
largely aristocratic ; its center had to a large degree been 
the court and the sovereign, and all of its leading literary 
products had been first presented with magnificent ac- 
companiments and with royal acclamation. 

It was this very element of aristocracy and exclusive- 



374 The Foundations of English Literature 

The Mass of the English People The Beginnings of Personal Liberty 

ness that made the period so brief. Beneath the gay- 
surface that flashed and glittered was the great mass of 
the English people whom the Elizabethan creators almost 
to a man had distrusted and despised. The Renaissance 
and the Reformation had come to them slowly, as all 
great ideas have come to the mass of English minds. 
They had come largely from the Bible, which a century 
of translation had spread over England. While Hellen- 
ism, brought in by the Renaissance, was molding the 
court and the aristocracy generally, Hebraism, the result 
of the Reformation, with its simple yet sublime ideals, 
and its appeal to the conscience and the individual, was 
doing its work among the people. The old spark of 
LoUardy, that had never wholly died in England, had 
been fanned into new life ; slowly it had permeated the 
mass of the English people, until it was ready to sweep 
over England with resistless fury. A century of the 
open Bible had taught the common people the meaning 
of personal liberty. The divinity that had hedged about 
the Tudors had been turned by James I. and Charles I. 
into contempt. There was to be no more divine right of 
kings ; the sovereign was but the servant of the people. 
Never before in England had there been such an awaken- 
ing. The slow-moving masses that had bowed meekly 
under the absolute tyranny of Henry VHL, that had 
allowed Elizabeth to work her will and then had given 
way to universal grief at her death, within less than half 
a century were crushing the royal arms, shouting over 
the beheaded king, driving the crown prince, terrified, 
into exile in foreign lands, and placing the royal powers 
of the Tudors in the hands of a mere country squire in 
whose veins there flowed not a drop of royal blood. 



The Age of Milton 375 

Incompleteness of the English Reformation John Milton 

It was indeed a fierce and stormy era that followed the 
age of Elizabeth, but it was bound to come sooner or 
later. Before modern England was possible there must 
be settled the great religious problem that had kept the 
island continually upon the verge of a crisis since the 
days of Wyclif. The Reformation in England had been 
incomplete. The rulers and the leaders had settled it, 
but not the slow-moving masses who are the real masters 
of England, and it required nothing less than civil war 
and a temporary upsetting of the very foundations of the 
government to settle the question forever. 

A brief survey of this last great epoch in the formation 
of modern England will complete our study of the founda- 
tions of English literature. Fortunately, the whole 
literary history of the period, as well as much of its 
political and religious life, is embodied in the career of a 
single man. The writings of John Milton in prose and 
verse form a complete history of the Puritan age and 
furnish the best possible interpretation of Puritanism. 

/. John Milton (1608-167^) 

Authorities, Masson, Life and Times of John Milton, 
is the supreme authority, and his Poetical Works of John 
Milton is the standard edition. The most helpful of the 
minor lives of Milton are Pattison's in English Men of 
Letters Series, Brooke's in Classical Writers Series, and 
Garnett's in Great Writers Series. Verity, Cambridge 
Milton ; Masson, Globe edition ; St. John, Milton's Prose 
Works (Bohn), and Arber, Reprint of Areopagitica, are 
indispensable helps. Among the great mass of literature 
about the poet may be mentioned Addison, Criticism of 
Paradise Lost ; Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare and 
Milton ; Masson, Three Devils and other Essays ; Myers, 



376 The Foundations of English Literature 

Milton's Life " a Drama in Three Acts " The Puritans 

Introduction to Milton s Prose, and Johnson's, Macau- 
lay's, M. Arnold's, Channing's, Emerson's, Dowden's, 
Bagehot's, and Lowell's essays on Milton. For a more 
complete bibliography, see Garnett, Life of Milton, and 
Welsh, English Masterpiece Course. 

" Milton's life," says his biographer Pattison, " is a 
drama in three acts." What is more, it is a drama that 
coincides almost perfectly with the three acts of the great 
Puritan tragedy. Its first period was one of transition 
and preparation. The dreams of the Renaissance faded 
slowly. Many of the beauties of the Elizabethan period 
had entered into even the sternest Puritan homes. Mil- 
ton's father was a lover of art and music and classic 
poetry. But the external glory which played over the 
period could not conceal its underlying falseness, its sham 
and impurity. The Puritan revolt, in its beginning at 
least, was honest. There was need of revolt if England 
was not to follow in the footsteps of Italy. The Puritans 
began by denouncing the most glaring evils, — the 
extravagance in dress, the vain love of show, the shame- 
less immorality of the playhouses, the abuses of the 
Church, and finally the bigotry and intolerance of the 
sovereign. There was little of fanaticism in the earliest 
days of the movement. Good Puritans there were who 
delighted in Shakespeare and the drama, and who loved 
art and literature and all that was beautiful. But the 
second and third generations of Puritans were narrower 
and less tolerant men. 

Miltons First Period, i6o8-i6jg. During the first 
thirty years of Milton's life he was Elizabethan in his 
tastes and sympathies. He was born in London ; his 
father, a scrivener in good circumstances, a broad-minded 



The Age of Milton 377 

His Years of Preparation His Early Writings 

and cultured Puritan, spared no expense to give his son 
a Hberal and well-rounded education. He furnished him 
with the best of tutors and in due time sent him to Cam- 
bridge for the full term of seven years. The young 
student was then ready for a profession, but neither 
divinity nor the law had attractions for him. He would 
continue his studies with no definite aim ; he would retire 
into seclusion to live with his favorite writers and dream 
in the true Elizabethan way of a great poem more ambi- 
tious even than Spenser's. His father listened to this 
most unpuritanical request, and allowed his son for six 
years to do his sweet will among the books and the rural 
scenes of his country estate at Horton, seventeen miles 
from London. The spell of romantic beauty was upon 
the young student. External nature he noted but little ; 
he lived wholly in the world of books. He read far into 
the night the Hebrew and Greek and Latin classics; he 
read the English Bible, the King James Version of which 
was then among the new books ; he read Spenser, who 
himself had been half a Puritan, and he meditated upon 
a vast, romantic, moral epic of Arthur and the Round 
Table. Had he been born half a century earlier he would 
have given us another Faerie Queene. 

He wrote comparatively little. He believed his whole 
life long that poetry should spring from a life that had 
been especially prepared and fully ripened. But the 
period was by no means fruitless. In 
college he had written several lyrics, — On '^^'^^' ?t'^"®^''°' 

^ "' ' n Penseroso. 

the Death of a Fair Infant, On the Morn- Arcades. 
ing of Christ's Nativity, At a Solemn ^g^g L°ddas 
Music, — over-rich, perhaps, in imagery, 
and full of youthful extravagance, and conceits borrowed 



^yS The Foundations of English Literature 

Their Harmony and Power L Allegro and II Penseroso 

from the metaphysical school of poets that was beginning 
to dominate English poetry. The lines, for instance, 

So when the sun in bed 
Curtained with cloudy red 
Pillows his chin upon an orient wave, 

might have been written by Donne. Yet were they mar- 
velous productions for a mere youth at school. Few 
poets of the world at twenty-one have reached such 
poetic heights ; the harmony of such a stanza as this in 
On the Morning of Chrisfs Nativity is not inferior to the 
noblest chords of Paradise Lost : 

Ring out, ye crystal spheres ! 

Once bless our human ears, 
If ye have power to touch our senses so ; 

And let your silver chime 

Move in melodious time ; 
And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow ; 
And with your ninefold harmony 
, Make up full consort to the angelic symphony. 

From his seclusion at Horton he sent forth a few per- 
fect lyrics, — L' Allegro and // Penseroso, the literary rec- 
reations of a sensitive, meditative youth who has lived 
long amid poets and sages, whose mind is as yet unruffled 
by the world's cares and problems, who looks out upon 
life over his book in the calm seclusion and Sabbath still- 
ness of his country retreat. There is not a trace in these 
perfect lyrics of the metaphysical school ; they are almost 
wholly Elizabethan in their spirit and form. They ring 
with a melody of marvelous sweetness; they are spon- 
taneous and full of the spirit of mere sensuous delight in 



The Age of Milton 379 

Puritan Elements Comus — Its Spirit of Revolt 

life; they are the last full notes of the true Elizabethan 
poetry. 

But Milton had none of the lawlessness and the careless- 
ness of the future that mark the older Elizabethans. His 
Puritan training had ever been a ruling force in his life. 
At college, on account of his conscience and his chastity, 
he had been called ** the Lady of Christ's." In his son- 
net written at the age of twenty-three he had revealed 
the depths of his heart. I would live, he declares, 

As ever in my great task-master's eye. 

He was not wholly lost in his books and his dreams. 
Echoes from the great religious struggle, which was be- 
coming more and more passionate, reached his retreat, 
and they stirred in him all the Puritan instincts that had 
been his birthright. In Comus, a masque written for the 
celebration at Ludlow Castle of the arrival of the Earl of 
Bridgewater as Lord-Lieutenant of the Welsh Marches, 
we find the point of transition from the Elizabethan to 
the Puritan. He who was to become a leader in the 
Puritan ranks throws his soul into a dramatic poem, — a 
masque, the most luxurious and decadent form of the 
drama. But in it planted deep we find the seeds of re- 
volt. It is full of earnest pleading for a higher morality. 
Comus and his sensual crew, with their glistening apparel 
and their heads of swine, stand for the spirit of vileness 
and revelry against which Puritanism was fighting. The 
lady rescued from their power is Milton's ideal of chastity 
and uprightness. The moral is everywhere obvious, — 

Mortals that would follow me 
Love virtue ; she alone is free. 



380 The Foundations of English Literature 

Lycidas — Its Hints of Rebellion The Last Strains of the Elizabethan Age 

It is a noble poem. It was the last and the greatest of 
the English masques. Its chasteness and its classic 
beauty, the melody of its blank verse, and the purity of 
its message place it among the few perfect dramatic 
poems of the language. 

During the four years after Comus the poet made rapid 
strides toward open rebellion. In Lycidas, which in 
many respects is the most perfect creation of Milton, and 
indeed of English poetry, we find open hints of militant 
Puritanism. The poet fiercely denounces the corruption 
of the Church, the throngs 

of such as for their bellies' sake 
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold. 

** The hungry sheep," he declares, ** look up and are not 
fed." But the day of reckoning is coming, 

But that two-handed engine at the door 
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more. 

Already the grim and terribly earnest soldiers of Crom- 
well were stalking over the land. The second period of 
Puritanism was at hand. ** Lycidas,'' says Pattison, ** is 
the elegy of much more than Edward King ; it is the last 
note of the inspiration of an age that was passing away." 
With Lycidas the Elizabethan period culminated and came 
to an end. 

Milton was waxing more and more warlike, but he had 
not yet parted wholly with the Elizabethans. Lycidas 
ended with the half promise 

To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new, 

but to-morrow never came. To complete his education, 



The Age of Milton 381 

The Civil War Calls Milton from Italy The Period of Controversy 

the poet in 1638 visited the continent. For over a year 
he wandered chiefly in Italy, where he met the most 
notable men of his age and where he found food in 
abundance for his intellect and his imagination. But the 
news from home became more and more alarming. The 
Puritan revolt was reaching its crisis. ** While I was 
desirous," he wrote, ** to cross into Sicily and Greece, 
the sad news of Civil War in England called me back ; 
for I considered it base that, while my fellow-countrymen 
were fighting at home for liberty I should be traveling 
abroad at ease for intellectual culture." He would join 
actively in the cause of civil and religious liberty, even 
though it meant the sacrifice of all his fondest dreams. 
The first period of his life had come to an end. 

The Second Period, i6jg-i66o. From a meditative, 
beauty-loving youth dallying with Latin meters, dream- 
ing of romantic epics, saturating himself with classic lore, 
and weaving graceful lyrics of more than Italian beauty, 
Milton now became changed into a fierce controversialist, 
a writer of pamphlets, a hurler of prose invective against 
the enemies of the Commonwealth. Puritanism had en- 
tered upon its militant era, and it drew Milton with it. 
The storm swept away the last vestige of the Elizabethan 
spirit. The penner of L' Allegro and // Penseroso was 
now tossed amid fierce waves ; the hoarse roar of tumult 
drowned for a time the poetry in his soul. Only a few 
sonnets, some of them, like ** Avenge, O Lord, Thy 
Slaughtered Saints," mere roars of anger, came from the 
poet's pen. For twenty years he wallowed through this 
fearful bog of controversy, and when in 1660 at the col- 
lapse of the Commonwealth he emerged, he had lost 
the spontaneous joy, the Elizabethan fire of his earlier 



382 The Foundations of English Literature 

He Sacrifices His Eyesight Liberty the Keynote of His Writings 

period, and he could now rail at Shakespeare and call 
such a book as Sidney's Arcadia " a vain amatorious 
poem." The last spark of the Italian Renaissance was 
fast dying out of English literature. But Milton counted 
not the cost. He threw his whole soul into the battle 
for liberty. No sacrifice was too great. He was warned 
by his physician that to continue to use his eyes would 
result in total blindness. His party called for a reply to 
the attack of the learned Salmasius, and Milton deliber- 
ately wrote it at the cost of his eyesight. Had the 
Commonwealth continued, and had it needed the full 
time of the great Puritan, there would have been no 
Paradise Lost. He would have sacrificed even the dream 
of his youth. 

The keynote to Milton's prose writings is Liberty, — 
social, domestic, civil, religious liberty. He recognized 
fully the value of the individual, — the liberty of every 
man to make the most of himself. His pamphlets on 
divorce arose from his own unhappy married life. They 
are an honest plea for individual liberty against a law that 
allowed no exceptions. His Areopagitica is a magnificent 
appeal for a free and unlicensed press, and his political and 
religious tracts plead for freedom from lifeless forms 
and old traditions. But Milton, despite his earnestness 
and sacrifice, accomplished little by his prose. Almost 
all that he did was to furnish fuel for the controversy that 
was raging so fiercely. The work in which he ruined 
his eyes did no practical good; all of his tracts were 
quickly swept into the great dust-heap of that most 
voluminous and bitter of pamphlet ages, and they would 
have passed into quick oblivion had their author not in 
later years written Paradise Lost, 



The Age of Milton 383 

Milton's Prose Milton's Life after the Restoration 

One who has read only Milton's poetry has difficulty 
to believe that many of these prose works came from the 
same pen that wrote the sublime lines of the great epic. 
They are full of coarse personal abuse, of rancorous and 
shrill invective, of epithets that well-nigh pass belief. 
Here and there, however, as in Areopagitica, there are 
passages that are truly sublime. Milton had not the 
aphoristic style of Bacon, or the flowing and graceful 
periods of Hooker, but he had a marvelous command of 
the resources of the language. He gives one constantly 
the impression of unlimited power, of sweep, of sublime 
rage. He is not always easy reading; he is diffuse at 
times; he delights in ponderous Latinized words, and in 
sentences long and involved even to obscurity, but one 
cannot read a page without being thrilled and awed by its 
power and its earnestness. " In him throbbed the pulse 
of the historic movement of his age," and one as he reads 
cannot long escape the resistless onrush of the writer's 
tremendous convictions. 

The Third Period, 1 660-1 6 j^. The year 1660, that wit- 
nessed the fall of the Commonwealth and the reestablish- 
ment of the old royal line, divides as with a knife-cut the 
life-history of Milton and of Puritanism. His work as 
Latin Secretary and general propagandist to the Puritan 
government came suddenly to an end. In a moment he 
became an outlaw, in peril of his life. He beheld his late 
companions dispersed into exile, fiercely hunted, brought 
to prison and execution, and he saw the political fabric 
to which he had given his eyesight and the twenty best 
years of his life, rent and scattered like a morning cloud. 
His property had been swept away, and now, poor and 
blind, with old age creeping upon him, with the dream of 



384 The Foundations of English Literature 

Overthrown but Unconquered Paradise Lost 

his manhood forever shattered, he settled down, a pa- 
thetic, lonely figure, to spend his last days. But despite 
all he was unconquered. He would return to his early 
dream and sing 

With mortal voice, unchanged 
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, 
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, 
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round 
And solitude. 

Few would listen to his song. About him echoed 

the barbarous dissonance 
Of Bacchus and his revelers, the race 
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard 
In Rhodope. 

Though the savage clamor of his times threatened to 
drown both harp and voice he would still work on ** and 
fij: audience find though few." 

Thus grew the immortal epic, Paradise Lost, a poem 
that stands solitary in our literature. There is in it not 
a trace of the Elizabethan rapture and self-abandonment, 
not a trace of the Augustan classicism and self-conscious- 
ness. It is a blend between the Hebraism of early 
Puritanism and the Hellenism of the Italian Renaissance. 
It is the record of the life-history of its creator. Had 
Milton failed to pass through just the training that fate 
had meted out to him the poem would have been impos- 
sible. It was written in the only moment in English 
history when such a creation could have been made and 
by the only man who had received the requisite disci- 
pline. His Puritan training, his familiarity with the Eng- 



The Age of Milton 385 

Milton's Life a Preparation for this Epic Its Scholarship and Accuracy 

lish Bible, had led to the conception of the poem ; his 
early studies in classic literature had made possible its 
form and imagery; the fierce drama of the Common- 
wealth had given it its intensity and vivid reality; the 
collapse of the Puritan ideal, which had been the dream 
of his youth, together with his own personal danger, had 
given it a tremendous actuality in his life ; and his years 
of loneliness and brooding, and above all his blindness, 
that had kept his mental eye fixed upon the world of his 
dreams, had given it a sublimity and an unworldliness 
that no other English poem has ever approached. 

The poem lives in another world from that occupied by 
the purely Elizabethan creations. It was the result of 
self-criticism, of careful preparation, of deliberate art. 
Shakespeare, the typical Elizabethan, had poured out in 
profusion " his native wood-notes wild." So full had he 
been of creative energy that, after once the glow and 
passion of creation had passed away, he had not given a 
thought to his productions. His work has come down to 
us garbled and mutilated. There is hardly a page that 
we can feel sure remains as it left his hand. But Milton 
wrote with exceeding care. His whole life had been a 
preparation for his poem. He had read the classics of 
the world as a preliminary discipline, and they may all be 
found in his great masterpiece. A set of notes explaining 
fully all allusions and all origins in Paradise Lost would 
be a complete biblical and classical dictionary. He 
worked with deliberation. Even the proof-reading of 
the poem — the spelling and punctuation — was done 
with minutest care. The book is peculiarly a life-work, 
and all that its author could do for it he did. 

It is needless, in view of the vast amount of eminent 
25 



386 The Foundations of English Literature 

A Solitary Peak on the Horizon His Later Poems 

criticism, to attempt a detailed analysis oi Paradise Lost, 
Its sublimity, its vastness, its mighty organ-tones, have 
been noted by all critics. Its most striking characteristic 
is, perhaps, its loneliness. It was an emanation from one 
** whose soul was like a star and dwelt apart." It has 
had little influence upon later poetry ; no imitation of it 
has ever been possible. It stands like a vast mountain 
peak, lonely and sublime, the supreme achievement of 
English literature. 

Two other poems — Paradise Regained and Samson 
Agonistes — followed Paradise Lost^ but both are inferior 
to the great masterpiece. Paradise Regained, in literary 

1667, 1674. Paradise ^^^ ^^ ^^^^t, is WCll-nigh perfect, but it 

Lost. lacks the intensity, the sense of actuality, 

'Tainld'^*^'" ^^' t^e sublimity of the eariier poem. In 
1671. Samson Agon- Samson Agonistes, a tragedy of blindness, 
we have Milton's last poetic task. In 
form and spirit it is severely classic ; the poet confessedly 
models it upon the Greek masters of tragedy. In its 
general effect it is strong and moving, especially in the 
passages that exhibit the once mighty Samson, now 
blinded and weakened, the sport of his enemies. Its 
autobiographical import is obvious. It was a fitting end 
for the poetic labors of the great Puritan. 

* * The Age of Prose and Reason. * ' To turn from Milton 
to the crowd of common singers that filled the period is 
like leaving the vast and solemn cathedral with its hush 
and its awe, its mighty organ, its presence of the sacred 
dead, and rushing into the babble and the clatter of the 
streets. The quarter-century before the fall of the Com- 
monwealth had been full of writers, and a few of them, 
like Jeremy Taylor, ** the Shakespeare of the pulpit," 



The Age of Milton 387 

Milton's Contemporaries *' The Age of Prose and Reason " 

the most inspired of prose writers, Robert Herrick, the 
last of the lyrists, SiR THOMAS BROWNE, the author of 
Religio Medici, and John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim s Prog- 
ress ranks with the English people second only to the 
Bible, were men of commanding power, but none of them 
added anything really new to the foundations of English 
literature. Even Bunyan, the strongest and most in- 
spired of them all, owed his power almost wholly to the 
English Bible, which he knew literally by heart. The 
minor writers contented themselves with merely echoing 
the great music which was passing so rapidly away, or 
with sounding weak and decadent notes that are now 
forgotten. 

With the beginning of the new monarchy there opened 
a new period in English literature, one utterly distinct 
and individual. The creators of the Elizabethan period 
seemed to the writers of the Restoration to belong to a 
distant past. Shakespeare and his school were now re- 
garded as the children of a barbarous age, — marvelously 
gifted, even inspired, yet fatally defective in art and in 
all that made for refinement. The new era of analysis, 
of propriety, of self-control and self-criticism, had opened. 
It was, to quote Matthew Arnold, ** the age of prose and 
reason," of self-satisfaction and complacent conformity 
to rule. To the disciples of Dryden it was manifest that 

English had never been properly and purely written 
until Waller and Denham arose." Literary form was 
now everything. It mattered not so much what, as how. 
Prose began more and more to take the place once held 
by poetry. The new interest in individual life led to 
biography, which now became voluminous ; the new rules 
of literary art led to criticism ; the two together led to 



388 The Foundations of English Literature 

Rise of Biography and Criticism The School of Dryden 

the analysis of moods and emotions and all those studies 
of individual subjective phenomena that have sprung from 
Burton' s Anatomy of Melancholy. A new literary dictator 
had arisen whose rules cramped English poetry into iron 
forms until a century and more of growth was needed to 
bring it back into its native shape. Until the rise of 
Wordsworth and the Romantic poets the school of Dryden 
and Pope had full control of English literature. 

THE END 



INDEX 



Abelard, 102 

Advancefnent of Learning, 361 

yEfred, 37, 68, 70-75, 79 

^Ifric, 78-81, 96 

Agincourt, 139 

Agincourt, Ballad of, 260 

Albion's England, 253, 255 

Alchemist, The, 322 

Alcuin, 46, 68 

Aldhelm, 46 

Anatoyny of Melajicholy, 388 

Ancren Riwle, 102, 104 

Andreas, 65 

Appius and Virginia, 287 

Aquinas, 156 

Arcadia, 230, 269, 275 

Arden of Faversham, 337 

Areopagitica, 382 

Areopagus, The, 226, 228, 229 

Arthur, 30, 98 

Arthur Cycle, 99, 100, 102, 144, 

Ascham, Roger, 169, 176-182, 

199, 210, 222, 268, 352 
Asser, 71 

Astrophel and Stella, 230, 249 
Aubrey, John, 341 
Augustine, 33 
Ayenbite, 104 

Bacon, Francis, 250, 312, 355, 

365 
Bacon, Roger, 57, 103, 130 
Bseda, 45, 47, 48, 55-59, 73 
Ballads, 145-147 
Barnes, Barnaby, 247 



377 
184, 



357- 



Barnfield, Richard, 247 

Barons, The, 92, 108, 138, 160 

Battle of Br unanburh, 76 

Battle of Maldon, 76 

Beaumont, Francis, 326, 337, 339, 

344 
Beowulf, 24-29, 42 
Berners, Lord, 181 
Bible, Translations of, 366 
Biscop, 46, 57 
Bishop's Bible, 367 
Black Death, 109, no 
Black Prince, 109, 138 
Blank verse, 197, 292 
Boccaccio, 122 

Boethius' Consolation, 73, 122 
Brome, Richard, 327, 351 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 387 
Bunyan, John, 240, 387 
Burton, Robert. q88 



Casdmon, 42, 48-55, 63 

Caesar, 12,16,18 

Cambises, 286 

Cambridge University, 103, 178 

Campaspe, 287 

Canterbury Tales, 124-126 

Cartwright, William, 327 

Catiline, 323 

Cavendish, George, 181 

Cavendish, Thomas, 217 

Caxton, 140-143 

Celts, The, 16 

Cerdic, 30 



389 



390 



Index 



Chapman, George, 231, 247, 327- 

331 
Chaucer, 107, 112, 118-128, 129, 

142, 168 
Cheke, Sir John, 178, 352 
Chevy Chace, 146 
Chivalry, no 

Chronicles, Anglo-Saxon, 75-76 
Churchyard, Thomas, 197, 255 
Cibber, Colley, 323 
Classic Comedy, 206, 212 
Claudius, 19 
Cleveland, John, 266 
Cnut, 38 
Coleridge, 316 

Colet, 156, 166, 169, 170, 176 
Colin Clout, 234 
Comedy of Errors, 305 
Comus, 379 

Constable, Henry, 247, 250, 255 
Cony-catching pamphlets, 277 
Cotton Homilies, 104 
Courtly Makers, 197, 225, 298 
Coverdale, Miles, 366 
Cowley, Abraham, 266 
Cranmer, Thomas, 169 
Crecy, 109, 136 
Crowne, John, 351 
Crusades, The, 98, 102 
Cursor Mundi, 102, 104 
Cynewulf, 45, 60-66 

Daniel, Samuel, 231, 248, 249, 253- 

258 
Davenant, SirW., 323, 351 
Davis, John, 217 
Defense of Poesy, 230, 283 
Defense of Stage Plays, 283 
Dekker, Thomas, 331, 337, 345, 

349, 351 
Denham, Sir John, 387 
Dr. Faustus, 289, 292, 294 



Donne, John, 253, 262-266 
Douay Old Testament, 367 
Douglas, 146 

Drake, Sir Francis, 217, 228, 239 
Drayton, Michael, 231, 247, 253, 

255, 258-262 
Dryden, John, 262, 323, 387 
Duchess of Malf,, 346 
Dunbar, William, 146, 152 
Duns Scotus, 156 
Dunstan, 37, 70, 78, 96 

Eadgar, 70 

Eadwine, 31, 46 

Ecclesiastical Polity, 355 

Ecgberht, 37, 70 

Edward the Confessor, 89 

Edward II., 108 

Edward II., 295 

Edward III., loi, 106, 108, 120 

Edward III., 337 

Elizabeth, 180, 214 

Endymion, 288 

England^ s Helicon, 253 

Epithalamion, 235, 238 

Erasmus, 157, 158, 162, 171, 182 

Essays of Bacon, 361 

Euphues, 111, 353 

Euphuism, 272, 353 

Eusden, Lawrence, 323 

Everyman, 203 

Every Man in his Humor, 321 

Exeter Book, 42, 64 

Faerie Queene, 238-246, 307 

Feudalism, 91, 108, 140 

Field, Nathaniel, 327, 349 

Fight at Finnsbruh, 43 

Fisher, 161 

Fletcher, John, 247, 326, 337, 339- 

344 
Florence of Worcester, 97 
Ford, John, 345, 351, 



Index 



391 



Four P's, 205, 212 
Foxe, John, 353 
Frobisher, Martin, 217, 228 
Froissart, no, 136, 181 
Fuller, Thomas, 326 

Gammer Gurtons Nedle, 207, 212 

Garrick, David, 316 

Gascoigne, George, 197, 199, 225 

Geneva Bible, 366 

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 97, 99 

Gesta Eomanorum, 98 

Gilbert, Sir H., 217 

Gildas, 30, 58 

Gorboduc, 210, 212, 292 

Gosson, Stephen, 283 

Gower, John, 107, 116, 117, 121, 

135. 136, 142, 168 
Greene, Robert, 264, 269, 273-275, 

285 
Gregory, 33, 74 
Grevil, Fulke, 229, 276 
Greville, Sir R., 218 
Griffin, Bartholomew, 248 
Grimald, Nicolas, 190, 197, 199 
Grocyn, 156, 170, 187 
Guthlac, 65 
Guy of Warwick, 100 

Hadrian, 46, 156 
Hakluyt, Richard, 280, 353 
Hamlet, 310 
Harrowing of Hell, 104 
Harvey, Gabriel, 229, 233 
Hatton Gospels, 104 
Haus of Fame, 123 
Havelok the Dane, 100, 104 
Hawes, Stephen, 188 
Hawkins, Sir J., 217 
Hengist, 30 
Henry I., 94 
Henry II., 94 
Henry IV., 137 



Henry v., 138 
Henry VII., 155, 160 
Henry VIII., 160, 168 
Henry of Huntingdon, 97 
Hereford, Nicholas, 131 
Hero and Leander , 253, 295 
Herrick, Robert, 251, 325, 327, 387 
Heywood, John, 204, 206 
Heywood, Thomas, 326, 331-336 
Holinshed, Raphael, 280, 353 
Homer, Chapman's, 330 
Hooker, Richard, 353-357, 364 
Howell, James, 327 
Hyke Scorner, 203, 204, 212 

Ida, 30 

// Penseroso, 378 
Interludes, 203-206, 212 
Ivanhoe, 86 

James I. of Scotland, 146, 152 

Jew of Malta, 294 

John, 95, 106, 108 

John of Gaunt, 122, 130, 138, 140 

Johnson, Samuel, 180, 262, 316, 

324, 327 
Jonson, Ben, 316, 318-327, 340 
Judith, 66 

Julius Ccesar, 310, 317 
Junius, 50 

King James Version, 365-370 
King Lear, 310 
Knox, John, 353 
Kyd, 285 

V Allegro, 378 

Langland, in, 113-116, 119, 129, 

158, 168, 182, 299 
Latimer, 159, 185, 199, 269 
Laureates, The, 323 
Layamon, 100, 104, 299 
Legende of Good Women, 123 
Lily.W., 176 



392 



Index 



Linacre, 156, 170, 187 

Lodge, Thomas, 231, 247, 255, 283 

Lollards, The, 131, 136, 140, 158, 

162 
London, 109, 166 
Lovers Labour 's Lost, 305 
Lucrece^ 253 
Luther, 162 
Lycidas, 380 
Lydgate, John, 121, 137, 142, 146, 

152 
Lyly, John, 222, 223, 264, 269-273, 

287-290 
Lynche, T., 240 
Lyric Poetry, 248, 250 

Macbeth, 310 

Magna Charta, 95, 160 

Magnificence, 203, 212 

Malory, 142-145 

Mamilla, 274 

Mandeville, 107, 109, iii, 128, 132, 

133 
Map, Walter, 99, 104 
Marlowe, 253, 264, 285, 290-297, 

305 
Marprelate Controversy, 279, 307 
Marston, Thomas, 326, 331 
Masque, The, 290 
Massinger, Philip, 348, 351 
Matthew's Bible, 366 
Merchant of Venice, 308 
Mermaid Inn, 326 
Merry Devil of Edmonton, 337 
Metaphysical School, 262 
Middleton, Thomas, 349, 351 
Midsummer Night's Dream, 305, 313 
Milton, 53, 240, 365, 375-386 
Minnesingers, 98 
Miracle Plays, 148-151, 211, 212 
Mirror for Magistrates, 225 
Misfortunes of Arthur, 210, 212 
Morality Plays, 201-203, 212 



More, Sir Thomas 161, 163, 170- 

176, 183, 199 
Morted' Arthur, 143 

Nash, Thomas, 277, 280, 285, 293 
New Atlantis, 362 
Nibelungenlied, 98 
Normandy, 88 
Normans, The, 92, 93 
North, Thomas, 280, 353 
Novum Organum, 359 
Nymphidia, 260 

Occleve, 127, 137, 146, 152 

Oderic Vitalis, 97 

Ormulum, loi 

Orosius, 58, 73 

Othello, 310 

Ovid, 223 

Owl and Nightingale, 100, 104 

Oxford Reformers, 156 

Oxford University, 103 

Paradise Lost, 384 

Paradise Regained, 386 

Pas ton Letters, 135, 137 

Peele, George, 285 

Peterborough Chronicle, 96 

Petrarch, 122 

Phoenix, The, 65 

Piers the Plowman, 107, 114 

Plautus, 206 

Poitiers, 109, 136 

Polyolbion, 253, 261 

Preston, Thomas, 286 

Prick of Conscience, 102, 104 

Puritans, The, 376 

Purvey, 131, 366 

Puttenham, George, 189, 194, 249, 

353 
Pye, H., 323 

Raleigh, Sir W., 217, 234, 239, 240, 
249, 255, 280, 353 



Index 



393 



Ralph Roister Doisier, 206, 212 
Reformation, The, 159, 373 
Renaissance, The, 153-156, 187, 

213, 223, 373 
Rheims New Testament, 367 
Richard I., 95 
Richard II., 109 
Richard III., 305 
Riche, 274 
Riddles, 64, 65 
Robert of Gloucester, 134 
Robin Hood, 146 
Robinson, Ralph, 174 
Roger de Hoveden, 97 
Rollo, 88 

Romance of the Rose, 98, 121 
Romeo and yuliet, 309 
Rowley, William, 349 

Sackville, Thomas, 197, 199 

Samson Agonistes, 386 

Scholemasier , The, 179 

School of Abuse, 283 

Scop, The, 40 

Scott, Sir W., 147 

Sejanus, 323 

Seneca, 209, 223 

Shadwell, T., 323 

Shakespeare, 221, 231, 247, 253, 

298-317, 319, 340, 364 
Shepheardes Calender, 235 
Shirley, James, 349, 351 
Sidney, Sir P., 147, 210, 225-231, 

233, 269, iis-'^n, 302 
Silent Woman, The, 322 
Skelton, 135, 146, 152, 188, 203 
Smith, T.,248 
Southey, Robert, 323 
Southwell, Robert, 255 
Spenser, 222, 231-246, 364 
St. John's College, 178, 190 
Stanyhurst, Richard, 229 
Steel Glass, The^ 225 



Stephen, 94 

Still, John, 207 

Stuarts, The, 372 

Suckling, Sir J., 266, 327, 351 

Surrey, 189, 194-197, 199, 292 

Tacitus, 23, 40, 85 
Taine, 14, 137, 265 
Tamburlaine, 286, 293 
Tancred and Gismunda, 210, 212 
Tate, Nahum, 323 
Taverner's Bible, 366 
Taylor, Jeremy, 386 
Tempest, The, 311 
Tennyson, 323 
Terence, 206 
Theater, Rise of the, 283 
Theodore, 32, 35, 46, 156 
Timber, Jonson's, 321 
Titus Andronicus, 304 
TotteVs Miscellany, 189 
Tourneur, Cyril, 345, 351 
Toxophilus, 179 
Tragedy, 208 
Trouveres, The, 98 
Tudors, The, 165 
Tyler, Wat, 109, in, 116, 136 
Tyndale, 157, 169, 182-185, 199, 
269 

Udall, Nicholas, 206 
Unfortunate Traveller, The, 278 
Universities, The, 102 
Utopia, 1 71-17 5 

Vaux, Lord, 197 
Venus and Adonis, 253, 306 
Vercelli Book, 64 
Virgil, 223 
Volpone the Fox, 2>'2-'l 

Wace, 99, 144 

Waller, Edmund, 266, 387 

Warner, W., 253, 255, 274 



394 



Index 



Wars of the Roses, 95, 138 
Warwick, 139 
Watson, Thomas, 247 
Webster, John, 337, 344-348 
Wessex, Kingdom of, 36 
Whetstone, George, 268, 285 
Whitby, Council of, 35 
White Devil, The, 346 
Whitehead, William, 324 
Whittingham, W., 366 
Wilfrid, 46, 57 

William the Conqueror, 88-92, 140 
William II., 94 



William of Malmsbury, 97 
William of Newburgh, 97 
Wilson, Thomas, 169, 181 
Woden, 34 

Wolsey, Cardinal, 170 
Woman in the Moon, 288 
Wood, Anthony, 270, 329 
Wordsworth, William, 324 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 189-195, 199 
Wyclif, 79, 107, III, 128-132, 162, 
184, 366 

York, School at, 68 



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Later Poets," " Woman in Literature," " The Humorists," etc. Graphic 
biographical data of each author are given, followed by a summary of his 
writings and the critical estimates of literary judges, with suggested and 
required readings, etc. 

Of the many commendations of this book from distinguished scholars 
and educators, in all sections, we cite the following : 

Prof. J. H. Gilmore, University of Rochester, N.Y. — I have no hesitation in pro- 
nouncing Professor Pattee's the best history of American Uterature for the use of schools and 
colleges now before the public. 

Prof. Granville H. Meixel, Midland College, Atchison, Kan.— As a handbook for 
class use it has no equal. The plan is admirable, the proportion of the parts well maintained, 
the scope adequate, the suggestions for reading and study excellent, and the critical estimates 
impartial, appreciative, and stimulating. 

Prof. H. A. Shands, Southwestern Uftiversiiy, Georgetown, Texas. — I have never 
read a better characterization of our American authors in so condensed and convenient a form. 
As a reference book, both for student and teacher, it is almost invaluable. 

READING COURSES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

For Schools, Colleges, Reading Circles, etc. 12 mo. 55 pages. Cloth. 
Introductory price, 36 cents. 

THREE courses are presented in this valuable series, as arranged for 
Professor Pattee's work with his own classes. Course I. embraces the 
five great periods in our literary history, and includes only the choicest 
work of the best writers. Course II. is devoted to contemporary American 
fiction, and Course HI. as an appendix to this, gives the best short stories. 
The references to biographies and critical works given with each author 
form a most valuable feature of the book. 

The Independent (N.Y. ), in a critical notice of the book, says : 

" Nothing can be more useful to the student, especially if he is reading by himself at 
home, than such a carefully prepared, systematic course as this. It gives, in a way, the best 
aid that a teacher can offer in telling him what to read, and in putting every work he does 
read in its right relation with all the others." 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

A Study of the Development of English Thought and Expression from 
Beowulf to Milton. 12 mo. 394 pages. Cloth. 

IN this volume the author has aimed to show that the literature of England 
has been a gradual growth ; that it has flowed out of the national life 
and is inseparably connected with the national history, civil and religious. 
The spirit of the age, the condition of the different classes, the gradual 
development of new ideals and new institutions, the various influences 
from outside that have helped to modify and to mold native characteristics, 
have all been carefully noted at each step. The foundation period is all 
that is embraced in this study, beginning with Beowulf and the earliest 
English writers, and closing with the great era of Shakespeare and Milton, 
when the language and literature had settled into their permanent forms. 
Our list includes superior text-books for all departments of instruction. Catalogues 
and descriptive circulars mailed free on application. 

SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY, Publishers, 

BOSTON. NEW YORK. CHICAGO. 



NOV 37 1899 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




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